Financial stress is affecting productivity, employee retention and business performance. YuLife SA co-founder and managing director Jaco Oosthuizen explains why CFOs should treat financial wellbeing as a business risk and how companies can better support employees.
Financial stress does not stay at home when employees arrive at work. It can affect their focus, productivity and performance, while placing additional pressure on businesses through absenteeism, staff turnover and employee benefits costs. In this Q&A, Jaco Oosthuizen, co-founder and managing director of YuLife SA, discusses the financial pressures facing South African employees, why traditional salary increases may not be enough, and how CFOs can build a business case for financial wellbeing. He also shares practical steps companies can take to make existing employee benefits more accessible and help build a more financially resilient workforce.
Is financial stress becoming a business risk that CFOs can no longer afford to ignore?
Yes. And for most businesses, it’s already on the books. It just isn’t labelled.
Wealthbit’s 2026 Employee Benefits Report found that 80% of South African employees worry about money most of the time. More than half of financially distressed employees spend upward of three hours a week dealing with personal finances during working hours. Over a year, that adds up to close to twenty working days per employee.
No CFO would knowingly sign off on losing a month of productive time per person. But that’s what many organisations are paying, because the cost arrives in disguise. It shows up as a focus problem, an engagement dip, a rise in short-term absence, or a performance conversation with someone who used to be your most reliable person.
The pressure is coming from three directions at once: cost of living, debt and growing uncertainty about retirement. Since the two-pot system came in, retirement savings have become a source of emergency cash for many employees. That solves this month and creates a bigger problem later, for the employee and for the employer whose group retirement and risk benefits are meant to provide long-term security.
So yes, it’s a business risk. It affects output, it affects how well benefits do their job, and it affects the bottom line. That puts it firmly in the CFO’s lane.
What does financial stress actually cost a business through lost productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism and employee turnover?
Most of the cost sits in places finance teams don’t usually look.
Start with time. Based on the Wealthbit’s 2026 figures, financial stress costs close to twenty working days per employee a year. For a business of 500 people, that’s around 10,000 working days. Multiply that by your average daily cost of employment and you have a number most boards would want to see.
Absenteeism is the visible part. It appears in leave records and rosters. Presenteeism is harder to measure and usually more expensive: the person who is at their desk, logged in and in the meeting, but working at a fraction of their capacity because their mind is on a debit order that’s about to bounce. Research cited by Stellenbosch Business School and a Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) study reveal that mental health-related presenteeism alone accounts for the R235 billion.
Then there’s turnover. When money is tight, a slightly higher salary elsewhere becomes very hard to turn down. Replacing a skilled employee costs between half and twice their annual salary, according to Gallup, before you count lost knowledge and the months it takes a new hire to get up to speed.
Finally, there’s the cost that can show up in group risk. Sustained financial stress affects mental and physical health, and over time that can feed into disability and income protection claims, which shapes what employers pay for cover. Sanlam Group Risk’s data shows mental disorders rising from 7.16% of its income disability claims in 2020 to 10.45% in 2023. Investec Life reports that mental health conditions now account for 18% of disability claims paid by large South African insurers.
None of these costs appears on a line called ‘financial wellbeing’. They’re spread across productivity, people and benefits budgets, which is exactly why they’re so easy to miss.
Why should CFOs care about what happens to an employee’s finances outside the workplace?
Because the line between ‘outside work’ and ‘at work’ doesn’t exist in anyone’s actual life.
An employee who spent the weekend working out which bill to skip doesn’t leave that worry in the car park on Monday morning. They bring it into the meeting, the client call and the spreadsheet. Financial stress is personal in origin, but its effects land squarely inside the business.
There’s also a cycle employers need to understand. Stats SA data shows that over 55% of household recreational spending in South Africa now goes to gambling. There is research indicating that four in ten low-to-middle-income earners who bet do so to cover living costs or manage debt. A financial gap becomes an emotional crisis.
Financial pressure creates emotional strain. Strain drives short-term coping, like impulse spending, alcohol or betting. Those habits deepen the hole, and the cycle tightens. By the time it reaches HR, it looks like a performance issue or a pattern of absence, and the real cause goes unnamed.
I see this as a joint responsibility. Employees need to take personal accountability for their finances. But employers carry an equal share. Supporting people through difficult periods is part of what an employer is there to do, and it protects the investment the business has already made in its people.
Are South African employees financially prepared for unexpected expenses, or are many one emergency away from serious financial distress?
Many aren’t prepared. For a large share of the workforce, one unexpected expense is enough to tip the balance. Nedbank’s 2024 NedFinHealth Monitor found that around one in five working South Africans couldn’t survive a month on their savings, and 48% would struggle to cover three months without borrowing. Nationally, the South African Reserve Bank reported a household saving ratio of -1.4% in the fourth quarter of 2025: on average, households spent more than they earned.
Think about what an emergency looks like in practice. A car repair. A school fee increase. A family member who needs help with medical costs or a funeral. For someone already stretching their salary to the end of the month, there’s no buffer. The options become credit, a loan from a friend or a withdrawal from retirement savings.
The two-pot system has changed this picture. It gave people access to part of their retirement savings, which helps in a genuine crisis. But for a growing number of employees, it’s become the first resort rather than the last. By the end of January 2025, SARS had received more than 2.6 million applications to withdraw, with R43.42 billion paid out. Alexforbes reports that 67% of its members who claimed in the 2025 tax year claimed again in 2026, and FNB’s research found the money went mainly to day-to-day expenses and paying off debt. Each withdrawal makes this month easier and retirement harder.
This is where group risk benefits matter more than many employers realise. Group life, disability and funeral cover are the safety net that stops one crisis turning into a financial disaster for a family. But they only help if employees know they have them and understand what they’re covered for. Too often, cover sits in a policy document nobody reads until the day they need it.
Being one emergency away from distress isn’t a character flaw. It’s the reality of an economy where living costs have outpaced salaries for years.
How can CFOs tell when financial stress is starting to affect an employee’s performance before it becomes a bigger problem?
The early signs are rarely about money. They’re about behaviour.
Look for changes in patterns rather than one-off moments. Someone who used to be dependable starts missing deadlines. Short, unplanned absences increase, especially around month-end. Personal calls during working hours become more frequent. People quietly opt out of team activities that carry a cost, like a lunch or a year-end function.
Some of the clearest signals are already in your data. Payroll and HR systems can show trends in salary advance requests, garnishee orders, two-pot withdrawal queries and short-term absence. Looked at in aggregate, and handled with proper care for privacy, these trends show where pressure is building before it appears in performance reviews.
Your employee assistance programme is another source. Anonymised usage data can show whether requests for financial and debt counselling are rising. Lyra Southern Africa’s five-year trend data shows financial stress moving from outside employees’ top 10 concerns in 2021 into the top five in 2025, alongside more requests for help with budgeting, debt and garnishee orders.
The aim is to look at the workforce as a whole, not to monitor individuals. CFOs don’t need to know who is struggling. They need to know whether the risk is growing, where it’s concentrated, and whether the support in place is being used.
When a manager does notice something, the best response is a conversation, not a judgement. A manager who knows what support is available, and can point someone to it quietly, is one of the most effective early-warning systems a business can have.
Are traditional salary increases enough to address financial stress, or do companies need to rethink how they support employees financially?
Salary increases matter, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But on their own, they don’t solve the problem.
There are three reasons. First, increases in recent years have often struggled to keep pace with the cost of living, so many employees are standing still in real terms. The PayInc net salary index shows that in the first five months of 2026, nominal net salaries rose by just 1.7% and fell by the same margin in real terms. Second, a bigger salary doesn’t automatically change the debt levels or the missing safety net that cause stress in the first place. Third, across-the-board increases are expensive, and for most businesses they’re not a lever you can pull every time pressure builds.
What does work is support people can use every day. Financial wellness is often treated as a once-off event that employers look at maybe once a year: a webinar during benefits enrolment, or a debt counselling referral once someone is already in trouble. That’s support that arrives after the damage.
The alternative is a holistic model, where financial wellbeing sits alongside mental and physical health as a permanent part of how a business supports its people. That means advice and practical tools available all year round, protection that covers the big risks, and rewards that put real value back into employees’ pockets.
At YuLife, we see this as a shift from simply paying people more to helping them get more from what they earn, and from the benefits their employer is already paying for.
What role can financial education and employee benefits play in helping people move from financial survival to financial resilience?
Financial education helps, but only when people engage with it, and that’s where most programmes fall short.
Most wellbeing support asks people to do something extra on top of an already full day. Support that needs spare capacity only reaches people who have spare capacity, and they’re rarely the people who need it most. A one-hour budgeting workshop is well intended. It’s also forgotten by February.
Moving people from survival to resilience takes three things working together.
The first is protection. Group risk cover gives employees and their families a safety net if the worst happens, so one event doesn’t undo years of effort.
The second is everyday support. Financial advice, debt counselling and practical tools should be available whenever someone needs them, through an employee assistance programme.
The third is engagement, and this is where we think differently at YuLife. Our app works like a game of life. Employees earn rewards for small, healthy actions like walking or meditating, and spend those rewards at the shops they already use or for day to day essentials they need like groceries or fuel. It turns wellbeing from an obligation into a habit, and the rewards ease pressure on household budgets in a very real way.
Resilience isn’t built in a single session. It’s built through small, consistent steps, made easy enough that people actually take them.
How can CFOs build a business case for investing in financial wellbeing when budgets are already under pressure?
Start by reframing it. This isn’t a new cost. It’s a cost you’re already carrying, spread across different budgets.
A credible business case has four parts.
- Quantify the current cost. Take your headcount and average cost of employment, and apply productivity-loss figures from sources like the Wealthbit 2026 Employee Benefits Report. Even conservative assumptions tend to produce a number that gets attention.
- Add the less visible costs. Look at absence trends, staff turnover and replacement costs, and the claims experience on your group risk benefits.
- Look at what you already spend. Many businesses already pay for group life cover, disability cover and an employee assistance programme. The question is whether employees know about them and use them. Benefits that sit unused are money spent without a return, so the first win is often getting more from existing spend.
- Set measurable outcomes. Agree what you’ll track from day one: benefits engagement, EAP usage, absence, retention and, over time, claims trends.
When budgets are tight, the strongest argument is that financial wellbeing is a risk you manage rather than a perk you offer. It affects the productivity of your people, and therefore the bottom line. That makes it part of a company’s strategic objectives, not an HR side project.
Could better financial wellbeing become a competitive advantage for companies trying to attract and retain scarce talent?
Yes, and for the companies that do it well, it already is.
South Africa has a well-documented shortage of skilled talent in areas like finance, technology and engineering. Xpatweb’s 2025 Critical Skills Survey found that 84% of large employers are struggling to recruit qualified professionals, up from 79% a year earlier, and 89% say unfilled roles are hurting their operations. When good people have options, they compare more than salary. They look at whether an employer will support them and their families when life gets hard.
Financial stress is also one of the quieter drivers of resignation. When someone is under pressure, a slightly higher offer from a competitor can be impossible to turn down, even if they’re happy in their role. Ease that pressure and you remove one of the easiest reasons to leave.
The difference comes down to experience. Most employees have no idea what their benefits are worth until they need to claim. A benefits package people use and value every day is far easier to talk about in an interview, and far harder to walk away from.
There’s a broader point too. Employees increasingly judge employers on how they treat people, and on what they pay. A business that takes financial wellbeing seriously sends a clear message: we care about your life, as well as your output.
In a tight talent market, that message is worth a great deal. It helps you attract the right people, and it gives them good reasons to stay.
If you could give CFOs one practical step to reduce financial stress across their workforce tomorrow, what would it be?
Make the support you already offer visible and easy to use.
Most businesses have more in place than their employees realise: group life and disability cover, an employee assistance programme with financial and debt counselling, retirement fund guidance. But it’s often buried in an onboarding pack or a policy document that nobody opens until they’re in trouble.
So tomorrow, ask your HR or benefits team three questions. What financial support do we offer today? How many employees used it in the last 12 months? And how would someone find it if they needed help this afternoon?
The answers are usually revealing. If usage is low, the problem probably isn’t demand. With 80% of South African employees worried about money most of the time, the need is there. The gap is access and awareness.
From there, the fix is often simple. Tell people what they have, in plain language and on a regular basis. Make it easy to reach without having to admit to anyone that they’re struggling. Confidential, always-available support removes the stigma that stops people asking for help until it’s too late.
Timing matters too. People who get support before things become a crisis have far more options than those who wait. Every month you help someone act earlier is a month of focus and productivity you get back. It’s a step any CFO can take tomorrow, at very little cost.
