The Financial Empowerment for Student Success (FESS) Initiative was a two-year initiative focused on increasing student success through the provision of financial services. Achieving the Dream, Inc. and MDC, Inc. joined together, with funding from the Bank of America Charitable Foundation, to support three Achieving the Dream Leader Colleges to design, implement, and scale financial literacy interventions to equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to better manage their finances and stay in college. Any institution looking to design or scale financial empowerment programs can benefit from the three grantee colleges' experience and lessons learned. These lessons have resonance whether a college is starting a program from scratch or building upon an existing structure to offer additional programmatic offerings to its students. [This document was written with the assistance of Colin Austin and Jenna Bryant.]