NWX-CFPB HQ CFPB FinEx Webinar: Financial Coaching October 27, 2016 1:00 pm CT Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. During the question and answer session, please press star 1 and record your name as prompted. Today’s conference is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I would now like to turn today’s meeting over to (Irene Skricki). Thank you. You may begin. Great. Thank you very much and thanks everybody for joining our webinar on financial coaching today. Today we are joined by two guest speakers from two financial coaching programs who I’ll introduce later but I’m very excited to have them join us. Just quickly some people are having some issues with the audio. You do need to dial into the audio separately from the webinar. I guess anyone hearing my voice did that, but it looks like most people are getting in so we’ll keep an eye on questions and answers in case people are having any issues hearing. So I am going to start off with just the usual quick disclaimer that government employees usually have to do saying that we’re not providing legal guidance and legal interpretation advice or other things through the CFPB and views are the presenters’ own. So just a quick word. I think probably most of you on the call know this and are familiar with the CFPB in Fin Ex but I always do a few intro slides in case we have any newcomers. CFPB is the new federal agency in town and we are tasked with helping consumer finance markets work by making rules more effective, consistently and fairly enforcing those rules and helping consumers to take more control of their economic lives and it’s clearly that third piece around helping consumers navigate their economic lives or financial lives that we are dealing with here through Fin Ex and on this webinar. Within our consumer facing side we have multiple offices that do different things to help consumers. I’m with the financial education office where we try to educate and empower consumers to make better informed financial decisions but we also work closely with the other offices that you can see and we often share their materials as well. And then,probably many if not all of you are part of the CFPB financial education exchange but again for anyone who might be new, CFPB FinEx is a way for us to get our materials to financial educators of all types and to hear back from you what’s working and what sort of things you’re learning and so we have a number of things we do to communicate with financial educators. If anybody on this call is not getting a regular monthly webinar if you just email cfpb_finex@cfpb.gov and say you want to subscribe or join then I will add you to the list. We’re about a year and a half in to Fin Ex’s life so far and we have been doing a number of things such as regional convenings around the country, regular newsletters, surveys of financial educators. This is I think our 18th webinar. Almost all are recorded and available on our website so we encourage you to all access that. There are - we just last week I think we passed our 2000th person signing up for FinEx so we’re excited about that and again our goal is to connect you to tools and resources. I just - I like this slide because it has little pictures of some of the resources we have. All of those give you a visual sense of some of the things out there. All of those things can be found in our resource inventory which is online although it needs to be updated. It’s already a couple of months out of date and we’ve had some new things come out. That’s all at the website. I’ll just show you the screenshot up here which is - of course it would be down at the moment. Here we go. The resources for financial educators website is consumerfinance.gov/adult-financial-education. Not the catchiest but that will take you to the website that has the inventory as well all of the things that FinEx has to offer. And then the last just little piece of background is we also have a link to discussion group. Again if you go to that webpage, you can see how to join that where you can also post your own materials as well as seeing ours. So that’s my standard background on FinEx. Before we get to today’s webinar topic, I just want to note that we actually have our next webinar scheduled so I wanted to show you the preview for that. We usually do the fourth Thursday of the month but the fourth Thursday of November is Thanksgiving. I do not question your commitment to financial education, however I would not ask you all to spend your Thanksgiving on a webinar so we moved it up by a week to Thursday, November 17th. And it will be a webinar featuring some new resources we have - reports and resources on helping youth achieve financial capability, particularly building blocks - developmental building blocks for young children up through teenagers to help them move towards financial capability. So we’ll be featuring a couple of speakers from the bureau to talk about that on the 17th. Okay, so that’s all my background and now we can get to the topic of this webinar. I am going to do the sort of overview of the research and then after I’m done, we will have two guest speakers to talk about their programs. So financial coaching - probably a lot of people on the line have heard of it. There’s been a lot of talk about financial coaching the last few years. A financial coach is a one on one program where a coach will work directly with a client to set and refine a goal that the client wants to achieve.The coach will work with the client to develop plans to take action towards those goals and then will support clients over time, including holding the clients accountable to making sure they’re doing the things that they have said they want to do. And here's a diagram you can see up on the screen. We’re trying to capture the sense that there’s different types of financial education. There’s financial information where people are given information in a group class.. There’s also financial counseling which is also one on one and which usually is around a very specific problem or crisis or challenge and a financial counselor will help people move towards making good decisions. And then coaching which is again more about supporting people to make decisions and take action. All of these are valuable. In no way are we saying one is more valuable but just to be clear, the financial coaching piece is really about helping people move towards the goals that they have set and supporting them. So we wanted to find out since this approach has been getting a lot of attention, we wanted to learn about the effectiveness of financial coaching. And so what the CFPB did was to contract with the Urban Institute which is a well-respected research and evaluation firm to do a randomized control trial of two financial coaching programs. I will say that Urban finished a study and put out their long - very long - evaluation report almost a year ago and it’s a great resource for all of you to look at. If you want more details than what I’m going to say, you can go to the Urban report. It is linked to in the report that we put out. We at the CFPB then created a shorter - a much shorter research brief. You see the screenshot here to kind of detail the high level findings and we found particularly important findings. Also we did a brief on implications from that study for practitioners which I’ll talk about in a bit. So again there’s a full long research report. There’s a research brief from us and there is a practitioner report. I want to note that the CFPB commissioned this research and paid for the impact study. The Annie Casey Foundation - a private philanthropy - paid for a parallel process study to better understand how coaching actually worked sort of from the perspective of the coaches and the clients and not just from the outcomes and numbers. And so we want to thank the Casey Foundation for co-funding. It’s a great partnership. Also thank Urban Institute and also especially think the two programs - the two financial coaching programs who were generous enough to let the researchers come in and, you know, lift up the hood and poke around and see what was going on in coaching and gather data so we really appreciate their willingness to do that. Those two coaching programs that the Urban Institute evaluated were Branches which is a faith-based nonprofit organization that does a number of different social services and financial services in Miami and the financial clinic - a nonprofit organization in New York City that offers again a number of free tax preparation, financial coaching, other financial services for working poor families in New York. And again we have someone from each of those organizations - (Haidee) and (Karina) who will speak at the end. So thank you to those guys. They did have somewhat different program - slightly different program models and different clients which lets us get a sense of how coaching can work in different places. I’m going to say a little bit about the study and I know research can be kind of hard to get your head around sometimes or a lot of numbers but this is important because we don’t have a lot of very rigorous evaluations in financial education program. A lot of research has been done and it’s all been very helpful but it’s not that often that we really have a randomized control trial setup. A randomized control trial, as many of you know, is where you have both a treatment group and an identical control group. And in this case it was people who wanted financial coaching in both of those two places and half of them were allowed to get coaching right away and the other half who did want it so they had presumably very similar motivation level and other characteristics had to wait a while and they couldn’t get coaching right away. They could access it after, you know, six months or a year or something. And that allowed us to then track them both and look at the differences and that allows us to really identify the specific impacts of financial coaching. There were a total of 945 clients across both of the two locations - New York and Miami - about half in treatment and half in control. The results I’ll show are actually looking at the offer of coaching. That means that even if someone didn’t show up for coaching and they are in the treatment group, they are counted as having been coached in a way. The numbers I’ll present are in some ways the most conservative way of looking at them. If you look just at the people who actually showed up for coaching, you would actually see larger results so just keep that in mind. Both sets of results are presented in the full Urban paper if anybody wants to delve into that. This is a way to really measure what impact does coaching have on people who are, you know, very similar to each other in terms of their interests in coaching. Just quickly, the participants of clients that were recruited in 2013 and 2014 - January 2013 to March 2014 - outcome data was collected from August through December 2014. We had three data sources essentially. There was baseline and survey - baseline and follow-up surveys. The participants looked at credit reports from participants and then there was administrative data from the coaching programs meaning, you know, their records of who came and when and what kind of goals they were looking at and things like that so we have all that data on the participants. So all that’s all the background stuff and I’m sure you’re happy that is done. Well no it’s not, sorry. One more background slide which is say just a word about the difference between the clients in the two programs. Each program had a somewhat different demographic they were serving. Branches was primarily working with employees of the municipal government in Miami. Low to moderate income but again for the most part they had employment and some benefits. Therefore you can see that their income is $39,000 and fairly high debt levels - around $56,000 - but still a pretty low credit score at 597. The Financial Clinic was dealing with people from the general population of working poor who came into their locations and there you h ave a much lower employment level at around 43%, much lower income - $22,000 annual income - lower debt level but still substantial at about $10,000, $11,000 but interestingly a fairly similar credit score at 587. We do have other demographics on race, ethnicity, household size - we do have all of that and I won’t go through it now but it’s all in both in the shorter CFPB report as well as in the long Urban report so if you want to see all of that then you can look at it there. But the basic point here is that it was fairly different types of clients though all in need of or interested in financial coaching who came to the study. I’m going to quickly share three buckets of outcomes. I will note that there were a lot of different outcomes collected. We’re reporting here on the ones that we thought were particularly striking or really showed the potential financial coaching. There were certainly others where we didn’t see as big of an effect and again you can see all that in the report. For example, generally the study saw very limited results or none or no apparent impact on say retirement savings. It makes sense these are clients who are coming in for other things other than retirement. They weren't necessarily potentially identifying that as a goal so but we did measure a lot of that. Again it’s all in the longer report. But the three areas here - first, the impact on money management behavior. People offered access to coaching and this is - again this is compared to people who were also interested in coaching - but did not have access because they were in the control group. They were more likely to pay bills on time generally and had an increased frequency of savings deposits. Financial Clinic and Branches had in some cases slightly different results so we’ve reported some more specific ones below. You can see Financial Clinic had 32% more deposits into savings, Branches clients had 19% more. So there’s different sort of specific results for each of the two sites but in the aggregate clients were more likely to pay bills on time and increased frequency of savings deposits. So those are I think powerful findings. One other one that’s kind of interesting is in branches 20% of people who are offered coaching are 20% less likely to borrow from family and friends. Turning to the second kind of broad bucket, impact on savings debt and credit scores. In this case there was more diversity across the different outcomes in part because people had different goals and different starting points but generally there were improvements in savings levels and/or credit scores and/or reduced debt. In particular Financial Clinic saw a little bit more increases around savings - an increase of saving per person of $1187, and an increase in credit score of 21 points. Branch’s coaching clients particularly saw a particularly high impact on reducing debt - quite a significant debt reduction for Branch’s clients. And then the third broad bucket is around attitudes and sense of self confidence, and here again across both sites people offered access to coaching reported increased sense of confidence in their finances and reduced feelings of financial stress. And again on the slide you can see there’s some different specific outcomes under that that vary a little by site. For Branches - 15% were satisfied with their financial situation, 12% less financial stress. For the Financial Clinic, 82% more likely to report making progress towards nonretirement savings goals. So again a variety of impacts but all adding up to greater sense of confidence and reduced feelings of stress. These are the impacts that we saw. There were a lot of additional things again you can see in the report. I’ll just note that these were very positive. Again this was a randomized control trial so you really are seeing the impact of the coaching process, and again not everybody showed up for coaching. We’ll say more about that in just a minute. So it’s actually in some ways the most conservative way to report these numbers. I think we’ve learned that coaching can make a meaningful impact in peoples’ lives and I think that while many people suspected that before, this is actually very strong evidence to that affect. Now I’m going to turn to some findings on implications for practitioners around implementing financial coaching and after I go through a few of these points, our guest speakers from the Financial Clinic and Branches can expand on all of this because they’re the ones doing all of the work so I’m very eager to have them be able to talk. But I will share the kind of six broad points that we saw in looking at the combination impact and process study. First as you saw earlier, in the two coaching programs in the study we’re serving different types of consumers in different communities and their goals and interests were different too. For example, clients at branches had identified higher levels of debt and often identified debt reduction as a goal and so that was a focus for the branch’s coaches. At Financial Clinic, on the other hand, they’re more likely to look at money management and tend to focus more on things like emergency savings accounts. So I think what we can learn from that is that coaching is a flexible approach that can work for many types of clients. It can be targeted and adapted to the needs of the community and individuals being served and so obviously the implications for practice is that you as potential or current implementers of coaching can design a program that can meet the needs of those who you are serving. The second point, and the next one I think, are helpful in setting expectations for practitioners. In both of these programs, takeup of financial coaching -- and I’ve certainly heard this from other practitioners in the field -- is often lower than expected. One of the biggest challenges that the coaching programs have faced as far as getting clients to come to an initial coaching session. Remember that everyone in the study had said they were interested in coaching. They signed up for this study. Only half again were given immediate access but even amongst those who said they were interested, which is in this case everyone, only half of the folks who had access to coaching actually ever showed up. Only 46% ever came to one session. At Branches 63% of folks never showed up, at the Financial Clinic it was 44%. I suspect this is not a surprise for many of you on the phone, both of those of you who are doing coaching and those who provide other types of financial education services. Getting people to show up and to continue to show up is hard. People have complicated busy lives and adding one more thing to the schedule can be difficult even if the person is interested. So I hope these results will be comforting news to many of you. Even the most successful programs are likely to have a lot of people who don’t show up. Some degree of drop off of clients, even those who’d expressed interest can be expected, and so practitioners can set their expectations accordingly while still trying to do whatever you can to make it easier for people to participate. Some of the factors that the study found associated with greater takeup: clients with higher credit scores were somewhat more likely to attend a session. The coaches that the researchers talked to said that it was important to establish credibility with clients and that that credibility and trust would then help people show up. Of course that would require you to come in at least once to meet with somebody. And then coaches often told us that clients who had higher levels of motivation, willpower or passion for change or dissatisfaction with their current situation were often potential reasons why clients would take up coaching. And also coaches know that it’s important that clients understand that coaching is not a quick fix. It takes time. It takes work and so helping to set peoples’ expectation are important. Then obviously there are things around convenience and accessibility of the coaching that can impact take up as well. So I think one of the lessons is that it’s not going to be for everybody all of the time and it’s important to think about how to target the service to clients who are more likely to engage in and stick with coaching. That’s perhaps easier to say than it is to do in practice but there’s certainly evidence that people who are in crisis may be more appropriate to go to financial counseling or some other type of service. People who have more defined financial goals may be more successful. So some of the implications you can think through about how to appropriately target coaching services. And again the practitioners can say more in a few minutes. Quickly, the third lesson - this really builds on that - is that even folks who come to an initial one or two sessions may not always stay with it. Some folks may come only for a short period of time and that can also be successful. So just to note that the average of the people - of the half the people who actually came to any coaching session at all - the average number of sessions attended was 2.7 at Branches, and 3.1 at the Financial Clinic. Across the two sites only about 20% of people who came at all went to at least five sessions. Quite a few people came to just one session. So coaching programs really need to maintain the flexibility to address both shorter and longer term client needs. Some people may not show up for more than one session so it’s important to maximize the benefit of the first session. That was something we heard from the practitioners. And again things like geography, transportation matter. These are things to consider when designing a program -- making it easier to participate and then finding ways to engage with people. Paying attention to initial impressions to encourage financial coaches to engage clients quickly and effectively are all things that a practitioner can do. Some people aren't going to show up more than once. It’s important to make that valuable. Another thing that we heard is that -- this will also probably come as no surprise to most of you -- the most common issues that coaching clients were concerned with were credit and debt. I’m sure a lot of you see that in your own work. The specifics vary by site and by person. As I mentioned before, among Branches clients, high debt was a major concern. The Financial Clinic clients had worries about being able to access credit and make up for past delinquencies and credit problems. With the likelihood that these common concerns are going to be seen in other coaching places as well, it can be important to have things, like tools, activities ready for clients around credit and debt as resources. And then, you could think about using credit and debt activities as marketing - as part of marketing campaigns to get people to come in for coaching since that seems to be of interest. That’s another implication for practitioners. Around client success - this really sums up some of the other things we’ve already said but we showed -- the coaching programs had a very positive impact on clients but the impact can vary somewhat person to person depending in large part on the person’s motivation, according to the coaches who were interviewed as part of the study. Coaches said that they had clients who were uncomfortable talking about their personal budget and finances, in some cases issues with other family members who might be involved, and issues with clients who were really looking for a quick fix for their financial issues. All of these things are things that coaches can work on to better understand and find the motivations and challenges of coaching clients and work with them in order to lead to a more successful experience. The last thing I’m going to say is there’s a variety of different approaches to financial coaching training. Branches and the Financial Clinic had slightly different models and there’s many others out there. Branches employed coaches with business and financial planning background or from the nonprofit sector. The Financial Clinic had both - some financial fellows who were recent college graduates who were doing one year terms of service and also career coaches who had more experience in social services financial sectors. Again both programs showed a lot of success so I think there’s room for many different types of models here. I’ll just note that while accreditation and certification programs for financial coaches do exist, neither coaches at Financial Clinic or Branches initially had formal coaching accreditation. Both organizations trained people to be coaches. Both of these programs used specialized coaches so this study doesn’t really provide insight into whether other types of staffing works, like using case workers or counselors who could switch back and forth between coaching - we can’t state the impact of that or volunteer coaches - things like that - but certainly in the case of the programs we evaluated there was a diversity of ways to recruit and train coaches and there’s many options that a practitioner could explore in doing that. I’m going to say one more thing - a couple more things - which is that we have a few other resources at the Bureau the coaches may want to consider using. We have a budgeting worksheet called My New Money Goal that might be something a coach could use. I’ll just put one screenshot up there. Again it can be found in our web inventory. We also have a worksheet on Five Steps for Making Financial Decisions that kind of meshes with coaching approach that might be useful for folks - again something you can order. And then also we have rules to live by worksheets on different topics that are something a coach could use to have clients help set goals and then determine how to stick by their own rules to live by. So I just wanted to put those up there to say that there’s a lot of things we have as well as many other resources out in the field that people interested in coaching could use to apply some of these lessons. So now I’m going to stop and we are going to hear from (Haidee Cabusora) from the financial district and (Karina Ron) from Branches. (Haidee) are you going first? (Haidee Cabusora): Yes. Can you hear me? (Irene Skricki): Make it a little bit louder and actually I just want to say one thing before you start which is that you’ve listened to me talk for a long time and now you’ll listen to our practitioner speak. We will have time for questions and answers at the end. If anyone has any immediate clarifying questions, you can put it into the Q&A box in the WebEx. There’s a place where you can send questions and we are monitoring those and so I can ask (Haidee) or (Karina) and then at the end we will open up for voice questions as well. You’ll be able to ask questions over the phone. (Haidee Cabusora): Hi. (Irene Skricki): Thank you so much for joining us. (Haidee Cabusora): Oh, thank you. Thank you for inviting me. My name is (Haidee Cabusora). I’m the chief program officer at the Financial Clinic and I’m totally happy to be here to be talking about the Clinic’s financial coaching program especially with (Irene) and CFPB who are such great supporters of the study and (Karina) who is a very dear and old friend of ours. The Financial Clinic was founded eleven years ago in New York City because 10 million households across the country work fulltime but have trouble making ends meet and our mission is building financial security. We believe that financial insecurity prevents individuals from achieving mobility and social service organizations from achieving their missions. And our framework is not just the core of our financial coaching program but informs our policy and our research agenda, our capacity building work and our social enterprise. We set up 13 sites across New York City and right now in our current programming it’s professional financial coaches that sit at partner community based organizations - domestic violence shelters, homeless centers, family justice centers - and as (Irene) pointed out the baseline characteristics - financial characteristics of our customers are pretty stark when they enter and probably not dissimilar to the financially vulnerable populations that many on the call probably serve. So what is financial coaching? Financial coaches help customers learn new financial knowledge and how to apply them to everyday financial behaviors. We use coaching techniques to change these behaviors using goals as drivers, recognizing customer strength, employing mutual accountability and creating a judgment free zone so that customers can make the decisions that best fit their household priorities. Our model is an outcomes driven framework. We’re looking to help our customers achieve action driven goals, establish consistent contribution to savings, decrease their financial transaction cost, improve their credit scores, decrease their debt and maybe a little unique to the Clinic - save a portion of their refund for a financial goal. We just crossed 18,000 customers - 2500 alone in 2015 and this really reflects a diverse set of financial stresses, goals and experiences and I think like many of the callers on the webinar, we’ve really had to make it work across different funders, settings and sectors and I think it’s given our model real core fidelity but pushed us to be creative and flexible to kind of meet the demands and challenges of financial coaching in the field. We also think it’s probably one of the reasons why we were selected to participate in this study. And it was an incredibly challenging project but now that we’re on the other side of it, I’m really pleased to have demonstrated a number of statistically significant results that (Irene) ticked off in her slides beforehand. I just want to point to some of them which is increasing the amount of savings and frequency event, reducing debt, increasing credit scores and really gratifying for us improvements in wellbeing and financial empowerment, lower levels of financial stress, improved confidence in achieving financial security. Here at the clinic we’re calling it hash tag, financial coaching works. And I think one of the things to kind of keep in mind especially from a practitioner point of view as you’re thinking about program development is that comprehensive programming - that kind of full range of not just the deficit oriented debt in credit but it’s possible with the same population even if they’re not working to be having those conversations about savings and goals. I think the slide’s a little bit shaded but hopefully you can read the light language in it. But there are challenges to financial coaching. One, training - coaching covers a lot of ground. A good financial coach has to know statute of limitations, how to write a credit reporting bureau letter but also a range of soft skills like active listening and mutual accountability. The second is content consistency. We know that no matter how good your framework is, how good your logic model is, it’s not always executed consistently in the field and we want our coaches to always use the same tools and language even when we’re not around. Again they’re hosted in sites that are not necessarily where the administrators and support staff are. So they’re really left in the field to be going through some really difficult situations by themselves. Uniformity - you might have a model but one of the takeaways that CFPB had was it has to work in - it can work in a lot of different situations and for different populations which is great but that can make for a very complex system and what we didn’t want was that coaches for instance in a homeless shelter to have a different financial coaching model and maybe not talk about saving as much as for those who are coming out of perhaps a coach that was at a union or hosted by a childcare center. Data collection - I’m sure many of you kind of share in the idea that data collection isn't always the most fun thing to do and so for coaches who are collecting baseline demographics, lots of financial information - the ability to do that easily and consistently is very important for a coaching program, especially one that was driven by financial outcomes. And the last is kind of continue the quality improvement. Coaching has to evolve as your populations move, your sites move. All kinds of things - changes to regulation - and so you need to create more rapid iteration than quality improvement processes overall. So I’m thinking about what the Clinic did post the randomized control trial. The first thing is the study taught us that we could focus on wellbeing more and our programs have been trying to do this by incorporating the CFS financial capability scale. We’ve incorporated both the long form and the short form of the CFPB financial wellbeing and soon we’re going to test out the CFSI financial health scale. We’re also trying to build out smart logic into our coaching so that if someone answers a question about not feeling confident about reaching their goal, you know, what kinds of things should the coach be focusing on in the first meeting and the second meeting. The second is understanding the goals and motivations - they matter. That’s what the study clearly indicated so we’re building new calculator tools that help the customers plug in savings amounts and dates and gives them kind of a large range of choices and options about which savings plans are going to need priority and maybe some other limitations as well. Also as (Irene) pointed out, we’re thinking about ways to improve engagement. One of the things that the coaches had been working on this last summer is kind of looking at the range of administrative tasks like partnership management, calendaring, appointment reminder calls. I’m thinking how to like smartly employ these services so we can reduce no show rates, make sure we’re communicating the services as effectively as possible. And last, we’re launching a financial security user system - actually past tense - we launched one last spring and primarily because we know coaching is impactful but if you think about a fulltime coach, they carry a caseload of about 400 people and there’s really a drop in the bucket of those who really needed services. So we’re thinking about ways that we can partner more robustly with our host organization so we can reach more people and simultaneously accelerate their sector specific missions and outcomes. Next slide. So we’re taking the lessons from the RCT and trying to also support the field as well, inform, you know, what we’ve been blogging about, particular debts like student loans. It informs our advocacy looking at, you know, ways to build more asset building opportunities at tax time or other ways to get people to save. We recently had two bills pass the New York legislative houses on splitting the state tax refund and allowing people to make direct contributions to 529 accounts and so it’s really been a very - a really helpful process overall for us. And to the last slide. And this is a photo of a New York City Council hearing this spring and it was on more resources for financial education for women, immigrants and older adults and I really love this photo because the individuals sitting there are a data associate and a financial coach who provided the oral testimony and we cited the randomized control trial amongst the on the ground experience and the data that we were collecting to kind of really kind of give a full summary of how impactful these services can be and again to serve not just those that we directly touch but impact lots more people than we could possibly hope to. (Irene Skricki): Thank you very much (Haidee). That was wonderful and I look forward to having questions come in at the end. I think we will turn now to (Karina). You ready (Karina)? (Karina Ron): Thank you (Irene). Yes, I am. Can you hear me okay? (Irene Skricki): Yes. (Karina Ron): Okay, great. Perfect. Well I’m excited to be here. Thank you again for having us and as our - as (Haidee) was saying, we’re just grateful for all the investment up until now with CFPB and Urban Institute and everyone who has really just helped to bring this essential information really to the larger community and the field. So Branches as (Irene) kind of gave a background on, we serve South Florida. We work in Miami, Dade County and we are a faith-based o rganization that has been serving the area for 40 plus years. Our programs focus on academic achievement and also on financial stability. I lead all the financial stability programs. We’ve referred to our programs as Grow, Climb and Achieve. Grow are the programs that work with elementary students, Climb are middle and high school students and the Achieve programs are those financial stability programs that focus on the overall long term financial stability of the entire community. For the achieve programs we also very much believe that comprehensive programming is vital to financial stability. And so while the financial coaching component is something that is very much centered in one of our programs, we have a whole range of other programs that are integrated into the financial component - the financial coaching service. As you can see, our programs range from small business support to financial products, emergency services and a couple of community-wide collaborative and initiatives that we’ve spearheaded in this community. Branches has two main campuses but we work with dozens of partners and we provide the financial coaching service and our other programs through other providers throughout the county. Our two main campuses as you can see here just from quick snapshots are based in North Miami and Florida City. Just to give you a sense of very, very diverse populations that we serve down here - for this particular study we focused specifically on county employees that had specific characteristics but overall our coaching program does serve a very wide range of folks - everything from different income levels to, you know, documented and undocumented folks that have very, very different issues. And so just to give you a sense that our - the lessons that we’ve taken from this study have really been able to help us to expand and refine the coaching services that we provide to a whole bunch of different populations. Next slide. For the Center for Financial Stability - as I said - this is the one that focuses on the coaching. We do have financial coaches - folks that at the time of the study were coming in mostly with financial backgrounds. One of the changes that I’ll talk about is actually that now they come from different range of backgrounds including social work and other very nonfinancial kinds of backgrounds and these are just some of the services that we provide. And as you can see to someone who comes into the center, they receive a whole wide range of services seamlessly without realizing that they’re probably coming in through different programs whether they be ours or program partners. So just to cement that idea of that comprehensive program model. In terms of the study (Irene) did a great job and the brief that CFPB has put out are actually really great in terms of summing up all the details of it. So I’m just going to focus on the changes that this has helped us with at Branches and I think for us probably one of the most valuable findings was that we really understood the value and the potential of that first session and that second session. We had kind of known subjectively but this really allowed us to know concretely that behavior change was possible within just that one or two or three sessions. That helped change a lot of things at the program level for us, also at the organizational level and I think it also really, really changed the way that our stakeholders perceived our financial services specifically the coaching service. To give you an example, even in marketing for example we have one piece of collateral that now uses the tagline, just two sessions can change your financial life. So this has really been something that’s been critical because we’re - we’re trying to have financial coaching be more every day kind of vocabulary in our community. This has been tremendous to be able to communicate to folks that it’s not necessarily something where you have to commit to for 24 sessions or whatever. Even one visit, two visits, three visits can already begin to change things. In terms of program changes we obviously focused on improving our engagement and we changed everything from our physical space and the environment that clients initially came into to staff training from our receptionist to our financial coaches and we really, really focused on making sure that our first session was bringing that value to that client. In terms of service delivery and program design, we have increased onsite partner locations throughout the county. We have increased phone and Skype type of options that address transportation and other kinds of barriers and also help us to build trust by placing ourselves in community locations where people are comfortable already with that particular community partner and so it helps us address some of the trust issues that we see when folks are first learning about financial coaching and what that relationship can look like. We also created some add-on components to our programming. We wanted to make sure that we’re - before we tended to focus on the target population of folks that were more “coaching ready” tended to have higher income employment and that kind of a thing. We wanted to expand and be able to add on financial education components or integrated partner services kinds of things, modified tools. Other things that would allow us to target populations that maybe traditionally weren't coach ready but through some of these additional components could kind of help people come alongside and help kind of sift out the folks that maybe could be coach ready at that point. So that has helped us to go beyond our usual target population. At the organizational level there’s been a very big culture shift I would say. The culture now is much more data driven and results oriented. We’ve integrated things like the financial capability scale, even outside of just the coaching program. Our staffing structure and our team development strategies have changed. There’s additional level of expertise and management, a wider range of skillsets that we look for now when it comes to recruiting and there’s different training that we do now in great part as a result of the study and the kinds of - the quality of service that we want to make sure we’re giving folks at that first and second session. And lastly I would say that in terms of this outcome oriented - more outcomes oriented framework that we’ve developed and taken - last year this process was focused more internally at Branches and this year we focused more on sharing this with the larger community. So whereas we highlighted four financial stability outcomes for example that will continue for our work at Branches,that has now been shared with the larger community through all grantees that work within the United Way Grantee Program here in South Florida which is pretty major and as part of our community wide work that we do, one of the things that we are going to continue to work towards is to have multiple organizations that are working in this year continue to share standards of excellence, coordinate services better and hopefully be able to share data and contribute more and more to the field going forward. (Irene Skricki): Great. Thank you so much (Karina). I will just - let’s see. There’s your - I’ll leave your contact up for a minute and then there’s one slide with just some resources that I’ll put up. So I already have three questions that have come in via email. Operator can you give instructions for audio questions so people can tee those up. We don’t have too much time but… Coordinator: Thank you. For questions or comments from the phones, it is star 1. Make sure your phone is unmuted and record your name and to withdraw that request, you may press star 2. Once again for questions from the phones it’s star 1 and record your name. (Irene Skricki): Great, okay and while those of you who want to ask questions via audio are dialing star 1, we’ve gotten three questions here. The first was aimed at Financial Clinic which came in during (Haidee)’s talk which is how is the financial coaching funded at the Financial Clinic? (Haidee Cabusora): We have a range of both government support through public funding so it’s written into New York City’s budget to support our financial empowerment centers. We serve on Eastern Queens and then we have additional support from a range of intermediaries here in New York City and then sometimes we contract out with a CBO that will want a financial coach from one to three days and we’ll find the resources to pay for the financial coaching time. (Irene Skricki): Great. Okay, let’s see a second question. I think this would be for both of you. How long are these financial coaching sessions usually? (Haidee) do you want to go first? (Haidee Cabusora): Sure. So to pick up on (Karina)’s excellent point that first meetings are incredibly important, the idea would be to have a 75 minute first session for us and then the follow-ups are anywhere between 45 minutes and one hour. Realistically it’s more of like a standard one hour for both first, second and third. It’s a little bit hard because we don’t always control the calendars and it just provides more consistency for the site coordinators if they have like uniform one hour blocks. (Irene Skricki): And (Karina)? (Karina Rahn): Okay. Okay so for us during the study typically it was about 60 minutes. I would say even now especially with us prioritizing that first session, first session is usually 90 minutes. 60 to 90 minutes I would say for the first session. Second and third sessions are usually 45 minutes. (Irene Skricki): Great, thank you. Somebody asked about - we talked about the kind of attrition rate or the initial - the 50% rate of people interested not ever coming and then the fact that some people only came to one or two sessions. There was also a question here about what is a typical no show rate which I’m interpreting to mean someone who actually makes an appointment and then doesn’t show up so someone who made it as far as the appointment stage. (Karina) and (Haidee) do you have a reaction to that - an answer to that? (Haidee Cabusora): Yes, it’s something that we track and the study was a tick higher than our normal 40% no show rate for financial coaching. But just to provide a little bit of context, we also provide tax prep - free tax prep services and we previously provided legal services and those no show rates are also - well they’re in the low 30’s. And so while I think the no show rates are important for good programming and efficient use of the coach’s time, I do want to put in the context that often social services do have higher no show rates than we would typically like. (Irene Skricki): No, I think that is very typical. (Karina) did you want to respond to that? (Karina Ron): Sure. We tracked those as well and for coaching specifically we have 40 to 50% no show rate to that first session but once they have actually come into the first session, generally the no show rate drops to 10 to 20%. (Irene Skricki): Great. That’s very helpful. Okay, I’ve got a few others. What are the qualifications required to be a coach? And then also what is the key to making the first session worthwhile? And then someone asked how do you provide car loan services? One of you brought that up so I’m just going to put all of those out there. Oh and there’s lots more coming in. (Karina):I can take a stab at that one since it’s got the car loan one. so in terms of what makes a first session worthwhile - I think it depends on the population that you’re working with but generally I think that you’ve just got to focus on what’s valuable for that like a credit report - something that’s tangible that they can walk away with in the first session is very key for folks that might be a little bit more in that - towards a crisis kind of a moment walking away with tangible resources or warm referrals to folks that provide emergency assistance. Or it might be for folks that are more in need of motorization. It might be something like vision boarding - something that’s just helping them even picture their goals. So it really does depend on the population that you’re working with. In terms of the car loan, Ways to Work is actually a national model that has recently been undergoing some changes. So one really, really cool thing that we’re doing in South Florida is what we’re doing is we’re building off of financial coaching and taking clients that are in need of this - clients who have, you know, no credit or poor credit and low income, etcetera and we’re tying them to or connecting them to credit unions. That’s what it is - credit unions - so affordable products through credit unions and if you’d like more information about that, feel free to reach out to me directly. (Irene Skricki): Great. Okay, I’m going through. There’s a couple of really interesting - there’s actually a whole little debate going on here in the Q&A which I’m loving but let me just see if there’s anyone on voice questions. Operator, do we have any audio questions that have come in? Coordinator: We do show one question from (Participant). Go ahead. Your line is open. (Participant): Hi, I was wondering if we could be sent the PowerPoint presentations being shown by each of our guests. (Irene Skricki): Sure. If you email the CFPB FinEx inbox and say you want the slides - and I’ve had a few requests via the Q&A function - I will send them out to you. So email cfpb_finex - F-I-N-E-X -- @cfpb.gov. You’ll see that email address up on screen now if you’re on the WebEx and just say you want the slides and I can send you the whole deck - mine as well as the other presenters. (Participant): Okay. Okay, thank you. (Irene Skricki): Thank you. There’s more and more interesting questions coming in. I don’t know which one to pick. Let’s see. I’ll ask this one. I like the fact the Financial Clinic is in 13 sites across New York City and it seems like a lot of employers to staff these sites. Is this a problem? Maybe that’s a question of how many staff Financial Clinic you guys are using to take care of all 13 sites. (Haidee: Yes, that’s a really good point. The financial coaches are on a rotation basis so they often cover a minimum of two and in the extreme cases, four but we only have one coach who does that and so it makes them really adept at having to figure out different organizational cultures, what motivates or what the missions of each organization kind of naturally reflect in the populations that are served. It kind of creates a very nimble coach and so it is challenging though to try to make that core model work across so many different permutations and situations. (Irene Skricki): And then I’m going to read these two comments which are very interesting. Someone says that it seems like with the high attrition rate or no show rate, there are two ways to address this. One approach would be to get more done in the first two sessions to make them as impactful as possible which came up and then this person also says but on the other hand you could respond by being more intentional in the screening process and it seems like that more screening versus more early impact might be a tension between those two. Can anyone speak to the pros and cons of these two approaches? I’d love to hear your guys’ reaction. I suspect that the screening may be harder to do in practice than it sounds on paper would be my guess but let’s see what (Karina) and (Haidee) have to say to that - better screening versus more impact in the first couple of sessions. (Haidee Cabusora): Oh. Well I think actually it’s probably both all of the above - that kind of response - and within the Clinic the phrase that we sometimes use is everyone needs financial coaching but not everyone needs a financial coach and what we’re trying to get at with that is that there are people who are just checking their credit report. They look at it. There’s no flags there. There’s really - they don’t have any intention of buying a house, buying a car, accessing more credit so in some sense like they’re accessing financial coaching but they’re not using the full impact coaching because coaching is really helpful for those who have like presenting issues like a core financial distress. And so some of that is screening - making sure that people are accessing the right slice of financial coaching that works for them and we can kind of get to that by, you know, helping on the host CBO’s or other partners kind of do the financial coaching. Maybe a workforce program might benefit from pulling credit report downloads because that helps make prospective job seekers more valuable candidates for future employment. And so where that financial security kind of lines up with their normal organizational mission, they can perhaps like take on a few financial coaching activities and then when they find the person who has massive identity theft or like has to figure out how to close down three or four credit cards then they can access the onsite financial coach who you get someone who’s first primed and ready because they’ve been given a particular motivation to kind of seek out the financial coaching and kind of stick with it. (Karina Ron): From Branches' perspective we’re actually okay with where things stand now in terms of the 40 to 50% not coming to the first session and then only 10 to 20% not coming to the second session. We think actually that a big part of the first drop off is just natural bandwidth, you know. Sometimes these things - you’re going to be able to start working on something and then their life priorities just kind of take over and it’s just not the right time. What we have done though is we have different levels of businesses. So for example we have what we call associate financial coaches which are folks that work with the people who are not necessarily interested in a deep coaching relationship and are just looking to maybe just have a one meeting with someone to particularly deal with like one thing. So our receptionist actually has been trained on screening the client requests when they come in and she’s able to place them with what we call like single services versus the coaching services. So there’s a screening process that goes on there and then - and then when it gets to them actually working with the coach, again what we do is we just actually kind of overlook since we know that we’re going to have 40 to 50%. The coaches just tend to overlook and, you know, if people don’t show up, they have other things to do during that time and so that’s how staff have been able to just deal with that. (Irene Skricki): Great. Thank you so much. There’s a couple of other questions about training and how to get started but since we are past time and there are people trying to get into the room here where I’m doing the webinar, I think we’re going to stop. But if you want to email any additional questions if you send it to that CFPB FinEx inbox, I can send it onto the panelists and get responses or answer in some other way. So again thank you so much guys. This was great. We had a great turnout. We had lots of great questions. I encourage you all to look at the two briefs that came out from the Bureau as well as the longer Urban report. And Branches and Financial clinic put out their own report with a perspective on the study as well so there’s lots of things you can look at and they’re all referenced in the briefs that the Bureau just put out. I hope people found this useful. It’s really exciting to have such positive results for a financial education initiative and we hope that will be useful to all of you in eiEx page. Thank you very much everybody and sorry we went over but thanks for all the enthusiasm that we heard from all of you. Goodbye, everyone. Coordinator: This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for participating. You may disconnect at this time. END