Should we build our own financial health score or use the FinHealth Score?

Use the FinHealth Score® unless you have a reason no validated instrument can meet. Building your own means designing and validating the questions, finding a benchmark to compare against, and defending the method to your board, and the Financial Health Network has already done that work.

What would we have to build?

• The questions, tested to show they measure financial health and not something else.
• The scoring, including how answers combine and where the tiers fall.
• A benchmark, so you can say whether your members are doing well, not just whether your number moved.
• The case for it, made again to every board, examiner, and partner who asks where the number came from.

A homegrown score can be useful internally. It is hard to compare with anyone else's, and hard to defend when the result goes public.

Can't we run the FinHealth Score ourselves for free?

For some uses, yes. The Financial Health Network offers the FinHealth Score Toolkit free of charge for research, advocacy, and internal business purposes, and many institutions run it as a survey, for example in Qualtrics. That gives you a snapshot. What a survey alone doesn't give you is everything after it: routing members to help based on their results, tracking the same people over time, benchmarking, and reporting your board can use.

When do we need a license?

Using the Score in software, digital platforms, APIs, or commercial products requires licensing through Attune, the Financial Health Network's exclusive technology partner for FinHealth Score® implementation. See the FinHealth Score® page for details.

What if we already have data and analysts?

Then the question is where their time goes. Building and maintaining a scoring method, a benchmark, and the reporting around it is ongoing work. Many teams would rather spend that capacity on what the results tell them to do next. If you've already sketched a score of your own, compare it with the validated version first.

How does Attune help?

Attune provides FinHealth Score® scoring through its software and API, tracks results over time in the FinHealth Record™, and connects them to what members are offered next. To see every option side by side, including a DIY survey and your platform's wellness score, see how the options compare. To weigh build against buy for your institution, book a call.

More answers for measuring financial health and proving programs work: Prove your financial wellness program works.