Employees left 33% of their paid time off unused in 2020, according to the U.S. Travel Association, a multimillion-dollar problem that PTO Exchange was built to solve. Employee Benefit News took a closer look at how the platform, founded by CEO Rob Whalen in 2017, gives employees more meaningful options for their unused vacation time than simply letting it disappear.

The piece highlights how PTO Exchange lets employees direct the value of leftover PTO toward things like retirement contributions or student loan payments, or even share extra time with a coworker in need. Whalen makes the underlying point directly: when PTO goes unused, that value effectively reverts to the company rather than the employee who earned it. "We're allowing employees to use this accrued productivity in the ways that they need," he says, whether that's emergency savings, retirement, or paying down debt.

The article also points to a deeper shift happening in the workforce, as remote work blurs the line between job and life, and financial pressures like student debt increasingly compete with vacation time for priority, static PTO policies simply haven't kept up. As Whalen puts it, PTO should belong to the employee, not sit as a line item on a company's books.

Read the full article here: Employees Can Now Convert Their PTO Into Other Benefits