SaverLife CEO Featured in Federal Reserve Interview

Laura Choi, Vice President of Community Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, interviewed SaverLife President & CEO Leigh Phillips on the financial crisis of our times and SaverLife’s emergency relief program. Read the full interview to learn how SaverLife’s research is informing our response to the financial fallout of the pandemic.

Here are some highlights from their conversation:

On SaverLife's Emergency Relief Fund: 

"Our client population is mostly low-income women of color with average annual incomes of $25,000. A sudden loss of income would likely mean the sudden loss of their ability to cover basic expenses. Many people lack that financial cushion. In a recent poll of our members, 83% of respondents said they had been furloughed or had hours reduced. As people were losing jobs and hours at work, it was clear our clients needed money right away for basic necessities like feeding their families.

SaverLife already gives cash incentives to people to encourage saving. When a funder asked, 'What can we do that’s innovative to help right now?' my answer was, 'We can get cash to people quickly.'"

On What SaverLife Research Revealed About How Stimulus Payments Were Spent: 

"When we see a sudden decrease in income, we can use that to prioritize who receives cash. We’re seeing stimulus payments come in, and we’re trying to understand who is getting stimulus money, how rapidly is it being spent down, and on what. We know that 50% of our members who received stimulus payments spent the money on necessities like rent and groceries within two weeks."

On Qualitative Research

"Transactional data can tell us what people are doing, but it can’t tell us why. I’m a big believer in qualitative research. That’s where you get insights into what’s driving the decisions people are making. Tragically, we’re hearing a lot of fear. People cannot feed their families and it’s very frightening. We’re also seeing on our community platform that there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about what’s available in terms of benefits. Almost all of our members should be eligible for stimulus payments based on their income, but when we polled them, almost 30% said they didn’t think they were eligible. Many also responded that they weren’t sure how the funds would be delivered."

On the Path Forward: 

"COVID-19 has revealed just how deep financial insecurity is. People lose their income and they can’t feed their family that week. It’s an immediate crisis. We need to start reverse-engineering the world we want. Imagine the scenario where we could say we were hit by a pandemic, but the vast majority of Americans had savings set aside in the bank and were able to use that money to get by until stimulus arrived."