How Candidly uses Hex Embedded Analytics to tackle the student loan debt crisis

We all want to provide our clients and partners with data that truly clicks – insights that are not just seen, but felt. At Candidly, our data science team uses Hex embedded analytics to provide our customers with in-depth, user-friendly, accessible, and actionable perspectives into the impact they’re driving with our platform.

As a mission-driven, data-centric company, we know that reporting this impact is just as crucial as generating it. Founded in 2016, Candidly helps the modern workforce accelerate and optimize student debt repayment with solutions for paying for college, managing student debt, building emergency savings, and saving for retirement.

Today, as a leader in modern financial wellness benefits, Candidly is positioned to help every American worker make simultaneous progress on paying down debt and building wealth. Our impact speaks for itself: to date, we’ve generated nearly $2 billion in projected student debt impact, and helped our users reduce their student loan repayment time by a projected 230,000 years.

Our customers and partners are the heroes who bring Candidly to their people. They need clear, compelling insights into how their employees or members are engaging with the platform and the positive outcomes being generated.

This isn’t just about data; it’s about demonstrating how our platform enables improved financial well-being for end-users — like the average amount employees are saving on their monthly student loan bill — and tangible organizational impact, like benefit enrollment and engagement. This necessitates a top-notch, scalable, and user-friendly client reporting solution, and that’s where Hex comes in.

Navigating the build versus buy decision

When it came to upgrading our client reporting, we faced a "build vs. buy" decision. Why did we consider evaluating Hex for embedded analytics?

• We already speak Hex: Teams across Candidly — from data science and engineering to product management, operations, customer success, and marketing — deeply integrate with Hex. For our technical folks, this means they're comfortable connecting to our internal databases in Hex, writing code and building dashboards there, and leveraging its full analytical power. For non-technical team members, it means confidently accessing Hex apps for reliable insights, knowing how to navigate its functionalities, and understanding when to use it versus other tools. We’re happy campers with Hex as our unified data platform.

• Focus, focus, focus: We want our internal rockstars concentrated on our core product innovation, not wrestling with the complexities of building and maintaining an embedding infrastructure.

• Speed to value: Hex offered a significantly faster route to get our desired embedded solution into the hands of our partners.

Our playbook for evaluating embedded analytics

While we already had a bias toward Hex, we designed an evaluation rubric to keep us honest that it would meet the expectations we were looking for.

1. Identify key stakeholders early: Understand their pain points and what success looks like for them.

2. Articulate the WIIFM: Clearly show each team "What's In It For Me?" I cover this in more detail in the next section.

3. Share your vision: Introduce the idea internally to gather feedback and identify champions. Leverage those key insights from the first step by walking the team through the current user experience — in our case, the awkward transition from our Admin portal to Hex requiring double authentication. Then present the hard data: we were seeing significant user abandonment at this critical handoff point. With this mix of qualitative and quantitative evidence, alignment should happen naturally.

4. Jump into an internal demo and POC with a plan: Assess your engineering bandwidth for a Proof of Concept and start building. Share documentation snippets with engineering — don't assume it's easy, but highlight those surprisingly minimal code changes. Ship iteratively, starting with your most critical use case. Pro tip: go beyond documentation with basic image editing to create mockups that help stakeholders visualize the embedded experience.

5. Open channels: Keep communication flowing throughout the evaluation. We set up a dedicated Slack channel and project doc — our single source of truth packed with ongoing notes, Q&A sessions, key discoveries, divided responsibilities, and evolving timelines.

6. Test cross-functionally: Get Product and Customer Success to test the UX. Does this blend with our portal experience? Would clients know how to interact with this? Does it feel right?

7. Lean on your vendor: We heavily leveraged the Hex team, gathering best practices, sharing feedback, and brainstorming improvements.

Getting everyone on board: "What's in it for me?"

A new tool or feature is only as good as its adoption. We proactively engaged our Product, Engineering, and Customer Success teams to ensure this was a slam dunk for everyone.

• Customer success: A drastic reduction in managing client Hex accounts and simplified onboarding. No more "Sorry, what's my Hex login again?" emails and calls.

• Product: A win for reduced user friction and greater client visibility into Candidly’s impact.

• Engineering: Hex has clear documentation, robust information security programs, and a valuable trial period. But the main seller: relatively minor code edits for a major feature enhancement.

• Data team: The power to reuse a single, dynamic template report across multiple clients — embedding interactive visualizations directly where our partners live.

It’s a match!

We got an early look at embedded analytics back when it was in beta, and it quickly became clear that this feature was the way forward for us.

Here’s what sold us on using Hex for embedded analytics:

• Seamless and secure embedding: We embed Hex apps directly into Candidly's protected client portal. This means our partners access vital data within an environment they already know and trust.

• Goodbye, extra logins: With pass-through authentication, our clients don't need a separate Hex login. Their Candidly authentication is passed to Hex using signed embedding via their Embed API – secure and seamless.

• Their data, their eyes only: Row-level security is a non-negotiable feature that ensures clients only see their personalized data.

At the end of the day, our internal teams experienced a reduced operational burden and increased efficiency. And our clients and partners get accessible and engaging insights more often without the authentication headaches.

Elevating analytics collaboration, internally and externally

Internally, Hex has been a catalyst for Candidly, fostering stronger collaboration between our data team and the wider organization. It empowers faster, more informed actions.

Now, with Hex embedded analytics, we extend this ease of access and rapid insight to our clients and partners, bringing them closer to the data that truly illuminates their program's impact.