When we talk about fintech, attention often focuses on tools visible to the end consumer: cards, wallets, open banking. Yet there is a less visible but structural component operating on a national scale, directly affecting consumption, taxation, and the organization of work: digital welfare.
Corporate welfare includes the set of tools through which companies integrate employees’ monetary compensation with benefits and services subject to specific tax incentives: from meal vouchers to flexible benefits, and services related to health, education, mobility, and income support.
Unlike a generic card or wallet, welfare is based on earmarked resources, usable only for specific categories of goods and services and through an accredited network. This architecture directly links corporate investment to people’s real needs, generating data, measurability, and analytical capacity on behaviors and benefit usage.
For a long time, corporate welfare remained tied to traditional processes and complex administrative management, accessible mainly to large organizations. With digitalization, welfare has become a system‑level infrastructure, integrated into companies’ processes and architectures.
In this context, Edenred is one of the main operators in the sector, with around 3 million beneficiaries, 180,000 client companies, and over 300,000 affiliated merchants. A digital ecosystem that offers companies dedicated solutions for employee wellbeing and engagement.
The evolution of digital welfare has progressively shifted these tools from a simple set of benefits to an integrated component of companies’ organizational and management models.
According to data from the Corporate Welfare Lab, the observatory promoted by Luiss Business School and Edenred Italia on a sample of 600 companies, those adopting structured welfare plans record higher economic performance than those without: in small enterprises the average revenue differential reaches +26.7%, and +29.8% in medium‑sized ones.
Today, 79% of large companies have a structured welfare plan, a percentage that drops to 32% among companies with 10 to 49 employees.
This segment represents the main potential for the development of Italian digital welfare: SMEs, the heart of the national productive system, where welfare can become a key factor for competitiveness and sustainability.
Article by:
Pietro Cristoferi, Public Affairs, Edenred Italia