Numbers can tell you what’s happening. They can’t always tell you why. That’s the gap our new research report, Lived Experiences with Financial Wellbeing Tools, sets out to close.
Earlier this year, our first report, Financial Wellbeing in the Workplace, surveyed 1,242 people using Hastee to understand how tools like Earned Wage Access (EWA) support financial resilience. The headline findings were clear: flexible pay helps people cover essential costs, take on extra shifts, stay in their jobs longer, and rely less on informal borrowing.
This second report goes deeper. In May 2026, working with the Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing at Aston University, we ran three panels with 18 people who use financial wellbeing tools — care assistants, support workers, administrators, and others across hospitality, health and social care, and security. We wanted to hear, in their own words, what EWA actually means to them.
One tool, many different stories
The biggest theme to come out of the panels: EWA isn’t one thing. It works differently depending on what someone would be doing without it.
For some, it’s a way to avoid piling more onto a credit card:
“I just feel like I’m constantly chasing my tail with bills… it’s just constantly never-ending.”
For others, without access to mainstream credit, the alternative was borrowing from friends, family, or colleagues — something several people described as an emotional weight, not just a financial one:
“Kind of gives me some dignity when I get into a spot, because no one has to know how I’m managing my finances if I don’t want them to know.”
Dignity came up again and again. As one participant put it:
“The money is yours basically. So you’re not borrowing anything. You’re not putting yourself in more debt. You get what you worked for just a bit earlier.”
The stigma nobody talks about
Not every story was straightforwardly positive. Several participants described feeling ashamed of using EWA, even while it was helping them:
“It’s something that I am ashamed of. I wish I didn’t have to do it, you know… it’s something I don’t share publicly because it makes me feel or look as if I’m not in control of my finances.”
Interestingly, that stigma was often reinforced by silence at work. Most participants said EWA wasn’t mentioned during onboarding, and they’d had to go looking for it themselves — usually at a moment of real financial stress:
“I wouldn’t know about EWA unless I was actively seeking… especially if you have to go digging around, it only adds to that feeling that it’s like something you should be ashamed of.”
One manager on the panel noticed the flip side of this: since promoting EWA more openly with their team, they’d had fewer anxious queries about early pay and entitlements. The takeaway for employers is simple — talking about these tools openly doesn’t just remove stigma, it helps people use them well.
A tool that changes with life
Perhaps the most striking finding was how differently people used EWA depending on their stage of life. Young adults without dependants tended to use it rarely, for one-off emergencies like an urgent car insurance payment. Parents used it to smooth out childcare costs that didn’t line up with payday, or to cover the unexpected — new shoes, a school trip. People going through a major life event, like an unplanned house move, used it to manage everyday costs while relying on family for the larger, one-off expense.
As one participant reflected after using EWA to get through a sudden move:
“I need to maybe plan and maybe need to start saving a little bit, just have some sort of emergency funds… I can’t expect my family member to bail me out every time I need help.”
Read the full report
These stories add real texture to the data from our first report and point to something important: financial wellbeing tools work best when employers talk about them openly, before someone is already struggling.
The full report includes further findings on stigma, financial exclusion, and how EWA use shifts across the lifecourse.
Download the full Lived Experiences with Financial Wellbeing Tools research report: https://www.zellis.com/focus/lived-experiences-with-financial-wellbeing-tools/
