This week we chat with Ida Rademacher, Vice President and Director of Aspen’s Financial Security Program, and Karen Andres, Director of Policy and Market Solutions for the Program. We’re hitting four hot topics: the power of automatic enrollment. What happens when we re-imagine retirement? Innovation among our financial services providers. And maybe most importantly, the call for a national strategy on financial inclusion.

The author discusses state-based automated workplace savings programs and how, when fully implemented, current authorized programs will have the ability to provide workplace retirement access for about 19 million workers – or about one-third of the 57 million workers who are estimated to be uncovered by a workplace savings plan today.

Addressing systemic inequities is so incredibly hard. You’re essentially fighting the status quo, and the status quo will reassert itself at every turn. Whenever you’re pushing for change to such ingrained problems, you can of course expect a certain amount of overt resistance, but the more challenging part can be the passive resistance. When people have the status quo on their side, doing nothing is actually a very effective method of killing the change. So how do you combat that?