eMoney, a company that creates planning software for financial professionals, has opened the doors to its new office in Providence.
The main draw to Rhode Island was the state’s support for startups, said Tessa Raum, eMoney’s head of people experience. The Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce has been part of the nationwide TechHire program since November 2015, helping local talent network with businesses. Add several local colleges and universities to the mix, and Providence is swimming in potential eMoney employees.
“The rationale for opening an office in Providence was all about talent acquisition,” said CEO Ed O’Brien in an interview. “It became more challenging, as we were growing pretty rapidly, to be able to find the right set of talent to help us build software and support our clients.”
eMoney, which has headquarters in Radnor, Pennsylvania, and an office in San Diego, has been in Providence since 2017, initially occupying a couple of split floors in the same building before moving fully to the new space in August. Originally, the focus for the Providence team was on product development and technology, but that focus has since expanded to encompass sales, marketing, support, and client services. eMoney has far surpassed its goal of hiring 100 people in Providence by 2020—it has 110 already and plans to add another 150 or so this year, O’Brien told me.
The company’s expansion has gone hand in hand with a flexible work policy. In Providence, employees don’t have their own individual desks. Instead, each desk is a “flex desk,” open to whomever happens to come into the office that day. Many people work remotely, or they work from the office just a couple days a week. That has allowed eMoney to go from having employees in just a couple of states to having employees in 27 states.
But remote work, if it’s not done right, can also contribute to a lack of company culture. Recently, said Raum of the people experience team, eMoney had to face the question: “How do we innovate around our culture and make sure that it feels real?” Its answer was to create an employee engagement committee to bring workers’ voices to management.
“One of the things we heard was that we wanted to do more around social responsibility and giving back, so in the last year, we launched a charitable match committee,” Raum said. “They’ve actually built out the platform —we use Fidelity’s workplace giving platform— so now we’re able to match employees’ charitable giving.”
Other initiatives include employee volunteer days, an internal kudos system, and even a tree-planting program: For every new employee hired, eMoney plants a tree. (Some longtime employees also had trees planted upon request).
Initially launched in 2001, eMoney was acquired by Boston-based Fidelity in February 2015. It has since shuffled its focus to better serve financial advisers and individuals with diverse needs — “breaking down the stereotype of financial planning just being for rich people,” as corporate communications manager Joanna Armandi put it. Today, eMoney estimates it serves some 60,000 financial professionals, and it’s targeting 250,000 potential clients in the financial advising space.
“Traditionally, we used to be sort of the higher end of the wealth management spectrum,” O’Brien said. “This year, we've introduced a new platform called foundational planning, that allows much simpler, easier to use gold planning that we believe can get more advisors using our software. All of it is the end goal: to have more people with financial plannings. And, as we have in our mission statement, helping more people talk about money.”
O’Brien was on hand Monday for a ribbon-cutting ceremony at eMoney’s new office along with Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza and Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo —plus the Rhode Island governor for the day, 10-year-old Cadence Solon, who won an essay contest and was given the privilege of wielding the giant scissors.
“We’re making Rhode Island, by working with the mayor of Providence, a wonderful place to live. You can buy a home, have good schools, things will be affordable, great cultural life — it feeds on itself,” Raimondo said. “I love it that you’re happy here, and we’re going to keep it that way and make sure this is a wonderful place to do business.”
