Unlock organization, pay, and benefits data from the industry's largest HRIS and payroll provider network.
Built for innovators
Finch powers integrations for innovators across Employee Benefits, HR Tech, B2B Fintech, and more.
Developer-first
Connect to any HRIS or payroll system in Finch's provider network through our unified data model. As we add new systems, turn them on with one click.
Finch utilizes best-in-class encryption protocols like TLS 1.2 and AES 256 bit encryption to keep your data safe in transit and at rest.
Read and sync your customers' organization, pay, and benefits data. Write deductions and contributions back to the system of record.
Finch streamlines integration build and maintenance, so you can focus on your core product. Get up and running quickly with our sandbox and SDKs.
Finch discloses data privacy practices right from the start, so end users know where and how their data is transferred.
Finch Connect displays the granular permissions needed to access the requested data. We only share data that's been approved.
Once your user approves, they select their employment system from Finch’s network of providers.
Your user is prompted to log in to their account, granting your application access to their employment data.
Finch is committed to perserving trust in the employment ecosystem. That’s why we protect the data of our customers, employers, and employees every step of the way.
Unified API
Finch standardizes employment data across every provider. So you don't have to.
Read basic company data including legal name, EIN, bank accounts, entity type, and locations.
Read company directory and organization structure including the names of individuals and the reporting structure.
Read individual data including name, email, phone number, date of birth, and residence.
Read employment data including income, employment type, start date, end date, and location.
Read all payments made the company including pay date, pay periods, and gross and net pay.
Read all data on a specific pay statement including earnings, deductions, and taxes.
Read and write benefits information, including creating benefits and enrolling individuals.
Integrations
Gain instant compatibility with hundreds of employment systems.
Exhale is a financial wellness platform that delivers a comprehensive suite of employer-sponsored benefits ranging from earned wage access to interest-free advances and smart savings tools with rewards.
With a focus on hourly workers in industries like services, transportation, and retail, Exhale needed a way to pull current and historical pay statements to get a holistic view of each employee and their variable earnings. Before launching the product, they sought out a unified API provider that could give them direct integrations to multiple payroll systems.
Today, Finch’s payroll integrations save the Exhale team 40 hours per week and allow employees to access their benefits two weeks faster.
Exhale was created to help employers who were struggling to navigate the administrative and regulatory complexities of giving their employees cash advances. A well-intentioned advance to help an employee pay for a flat tire or medical bill can put undue risk on the employer if not administered appropriately. At the same time, many financially stressed employees are hesitant to ask for help directly, which can make them more likely to turn to payday lenders or rack up credit card debt.
The platform makes it easier for employers to support their workforce with financial wellness benefits that keep employees financially healthy while helping them build a safety net.
“We found that people need different things at different times. The goal of the product is to help alleviate cash flow problems for people,” said Giaco Corsiglia, Exhale’s Lead Engineer.
Exhale’s “Perks” include Earned Wage Access (EWA), interest-free cash advances that can be paid back from an employee’s paycheck, and saving tools that reward employees for contributing for a certain period of time or hitting designated benchmarks.
On the employer side, Exhale helps reduce turnover, fosters employee loyalty, and boosts productivity by mitigating financial stress among employees.
“It's a super cost-effective way to drive retention and employee loyalty in a way that is actually doing right by your employees,” Corsiglia said.
To deliver on their product vision, the Exhale team knew they’d need visibility into each employee’s expected take-home pay and the ability to route funds from payroll—whether that be to the employee’s bank account, an Exhale Save account, or back to themselves in the form of repayment for cash advances. All this would require integrations to potentially hundreds of different payroll systems—or significant manual work from employers.
Exhale chose to work with Finch for its industry-leading coverage of payroll systems and data granularity. As Corsiglia put it, the team was confident that their product roadmap wouldn’t be hindered by limitations of Finch’s API.
“Payroll is just so fragmented, and we didn’t want to limit our client pool by picking one payroll software to integrate with,” Corsiglia explained. “Without Finch, we would have had to build API integrations with 100 different payroll systems in-house or we would have had to say no to a bunch of our early clients.”
"Without Finch, we would have had to build API integrations with 100 different payroll systems in-house or we would have had to say no to a bunch of our early clients."
Exhale still supports manual operations for some employers, but the resource-intensive process takes an hour each week per each employer. By leveraging automation through their payroll integrations, Exhale estimates they’ve saved about 40 hours per week for their Operations team.
“Our manual version works, and we make it as painless for our customers as possible, but it's always preferable to just say, ‘Oh, you sign in to payroll, and then you just never worry about it again.’”
Employers, especially those in fast-paced service industries, have enough on their plate; so it’s important to Exhale that their product is as easy to use as possible.
With integrations to each employer’s payroll system, Exhale is able to pull organization and payroll data automatically to enroll employees as they’re hired, unenroll employees after a termination, and receive new and historical pay data without manual file uploads. Once the initial connection is made, employers don’t have to think about administering the benefits; an automatic invitation system allows employees to sign up for Exhale’s Perks whenever they want.
“With our integrations, we can offer these benefits automatically, and setting up Exhale is sort of set-it-and-forget-it,” Corsiglia said. “If employers had to be duplicating records manually between payroll and Exhale, not only would it be error-prone, it would just be time consuming. Our goal is to give employers less to worry about, not more.”
Plus, with access to historical pay data through Finch, Exhale can offer all of their Perks to employees on the same day the payroll connection is verified—up to 2 weeks faster than if Exhale had to wait for data from the next pay cycle.
Because most people using Exhale are hourly employees, take-home pay can fluctuate significantly with each pay period. To get a holistic view of each employee’s financial situation and determine what they can safely afford to borrow, Exhale needs access to historical data.
Rather than relying on the employer to send pay data dating back months or delaying employees’ access to their financial benefits, Exhale is able to pull that information directly from the payroll system at any time.
“Take Earned Wage Access for example. We have to know how much you've earned to give you a portion of your pay ahead of time. We also have to know what your earnings typically are, so we can give you an amount that you can safely pay back,” Corsiglia said. “By pulling that data out of payroll via Finch, we can get tons of historical pay data for our users. They sign up for Exhale, and it's like, ‘Oh, here you go. You can have $100 today because we know what your paycheck is going to be.’”
Nikki Collister, Product Content Lead at Exhale, added that historical payroll data allows the product to surface insights for employers that they might not be able to glean from their payroll system alone, like average income levels across different business locations or average tenure.
“The payroll integrations we have through Finch have helped us to understand our impact on each of these clients and show how Exhale has delivered value over time,” she said. “It not only helps us provide better benefits, but it helps the employers better understand their business and their employees.”
“[Finch] not only helps us provide better benefits, but it helps the employers better understand their business and their employees.”
In the coming months and years, Exhale plans to expand their suite of financial wellness solutions with Finch’s payroll integrations. The latest product the company is working on addresses one of the biggest reasons employees request advances from Exhale today: rent payment. This solution—which will allow Exhale to facilitate on-time rent payments that employees then pay back in smaller increments from their paycheck—is another way of providing extra breathing room for those living paycheck-to-paycheck or looking to better manage their budget.
“We’ll continue to grow our suite, and some of that growth will require deeper integrations with payroll,” Corsiglia said. “Our goal is to become the home for all of the financial benefits you might offer your employees.”
Saveday, a zero-employer cost 401(k) provider, has built its company ethos around the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be. To cultivate this service-first culture, the company needed a way to remove as much friction as possible from the employer experience, from onboarding to day-to-day operations.
Today, Saveday integrates with 40 different payroll providers through Finch to power retirement plans for more than 300 employers. Since transitioning from manual operations to automated integrations, Saveday has reduced onboarding time from 5 hours to less than 15 minutes and reduced payroll processing time by nearly 100%.
Before partnering with Finch, Saveday ran its operations the way most 401(k) providers have for decades: the Operations team collected employers’ payroll data through automated file transfer, manual uploads, or even tools like Dropbox, then normalized and entered that data into the Saveday system.
“We were too inefficient, we were losing too much money, we were experiencing too many errors. We were spending all of our time trying to be in compliance with plans,” explained CTO Albert Swantner. “Just because of the sheer amount of data we were trying to sift through, it was hard for us to keep track of it all.”
"We were spending all of our time trying to be in compliance with plans. Just because of the sheer amount of data we were trying to sift through, it was hard for us to keep track of it all.”
Even under the best of circumstances, processing an individual sponsor’s payroll took 2 hours on average. But there were other factors at play: sometimes sponsors forgot how to export the data correctly, or their main point of contact left the company or went on vacation, taking their institutional knowledge with them. Other times, typos made their way into the manual data entry, or sponsors were late in sending their data.
Processing hundreds of payrolls manually each week was time-intensive and made it all too easy to make contributions late or calculate deductions wrong. That had big implications for Saveday, from spending hours on back-calculations and corrections to making up the cost difference in what the investment should have been—all of which amounted to direct, hard costs against the company’s bottom line.
“There was a whole workflow of things that all had to be perfect,” Albert said. “It's not good enough to just be good in this business—it has to be perfect.”
The team at Saveday had tried to make their processes more efficient by building 1:1 API integrations with the payroll providers they encountered most often, but none ever made it “across the finish line.” When Albert joined as CTO in 2023, he immediately began looking for a unified API solution.
“From an engineer’s perspective, it’s easy to imagine you can just do it by yourself; but the other side of me is business-oriented. If we tried to build this all ourselves, the maintenance would be insane. That’s all we’d do—maintain the product. We’d never achieve our other goals and hit our growth metrics.”
Finch ultimately came out on top, in large part because its Unified Employment API standardizes data across all payroll providers, so Saveday’s operational and technical teams don’t have to.
Saveday uses Finch to natively integrate with 40 different payroll providers. Processing a single payroll for a sponsor—a process that used to take 2+ hours—is now instant for Saveday and the sponsor.
“There have been a lot of benefits to Saveday. We’ve saved a ton of money, made our model profitable, and reduced compliance issues. Everything has gotten better for our team,” Albert said.
“We’ve saved a ton of money, made our model profitable, and reduced compliance issues. Everything has gotten better for our team."
Saveday is focused on making it as easy as possible for SMB employers to offer a retirement plan, partially by stripping out the “million and one bells and whistles” that the majority of employers don’t need or want.
By coupling those simplified investment portfolios with Finch’s payroll integrations, Saveday was able to reduce its standard onboarding time from 5 hours to just 15 minutes.
Aaron Frankel, Saveday’s VP of Marketing and Sales, recalled speaking to the owner of a 5-person company that turned to Saveday after another 401(k) provider had them sit through 5 one-hour meetings just to choose all the specifics of their plan.
“They told us, ‘It was maddening. I don’t have time for all of that,’” Aaron said. “With the Finch integration, once you hit that button to start onboarding, it’s 15 minutes or less, and you don’t even have to have a conversation with anyone at Saveday about it.”
Once the initial onboarding is complete, Saveday is able to pull employee data and write changes back to the payroll automatically, meaning the sponsor doesn’t need to have any involvement with the day-to-day management of their plan.
“The plan administrator doesn't have to do anything, because the payrolls are synced, the censuses are synced, everything is done,” Albert said. “Most people are just like, ‘That can't be it.’ And we can tell them no, really, that’s it. You don't have to think about us ever again.”
Saveday’s bidirectional access to its sponsor's payroll systems does more than just bring critical employee data into its own system; it also allows the team to make changes back to the employer’s payroll.
Before Finch, when a participant made a change to their contribution amount, Saveday’s team sent a notice to the sponsor, who then had to manually update the payroll system. This created a problem on two fronts: it put more work on the sponsor’s plate, and it left Saveday completely in the dark as to whether the change had actually been made.
“There was always a kind of disconnect between the participant, the sponsor, and us. It was hard for us to validate whether a change had been made or not, or if they put in the right number, because we had no access,” Albert explained. “When we integrated, we were able to go back and validate: are the deduction percentages correct? If not, we need to update them with what the participant thinks they are.”
These 360° integrations have made it far easier for Saveday to stay compliant under SECURE 2.0, because they can automatically enroll participants and auto-escalate those participants’ contributions, all without ever having to go through the sponsor.
“Pre-integrations, that additional manual workload on the back end translated to a higher expense for the customers,” Aaron added. “Every time we can gain efficiency, that allows us to be much more competitive and accessible for our clients.”
“Every time we can gain efficiency, that allows us to be much more competitive and accessible for our clients.”
Saveday already has impressive market coverage with the 40 payroll integrations the company uses today, but Albert and Aaron have plans to add more—much more.
“With Finch, we were able to get 40 integrations up and running in 3 months. We might have had a single payroll integration in 3 months if we’d written it ourselves,” Albert said.
Whenever the team encounters a new payroll provider through a prospective customer, their first step is to see if Finch already has an integration with that provider. And if the integration doesn’t already exist, Saveday asks if they can make an introduction.
The way Aaron sees it, Saveday has an opportunity to make retirement benefits more accessible to the 57 million Americans that don’t have a plan for the future. Partnering with a unified API like Finch makes it possible to expand Saveday’s offering at scale and at an affordable price.
“It's been great for our business,” Albert added. “Finch has helped us deliver on the promise of a high-quality 401(k) at a price that everyone can afford and be happy with.”
Human Interest is a full-service 401(k) provider on a mission to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to offer retirement plans to their employees. An early adopter of 401(k) payroll integrations, Human Interest needed a reliable way to expand their home-grown 360° integrations to more providers—especially those that were hard to build directly.
Human Interest was ahead of the API integration curve. The 401(k) recordkeeper’s leadership recognized early on that the benefits that seamless, 360° data flow payroll integrations could offer were critical to their success, both to offer a best-in-class user experience and to support the wide range of plan designs sponsors need.
“Integrations are often the number one thing when differentiating yourself,” said Drew Obston, Manager of Product Operations. “We’re always looking for an opportunity to improve our value offering. With integrations, we’re able to go above and beyond and say, ‘You don’t have to upload payroll data. You don’t have to be provisioning someone on our team to log in to your payroll.’” For small and midsize businesses, where HR admins wear a lot of hats, that kind of user experience is paramount.
Human Interest boasts more than 500 payroll integrations, many of which were built in-house. While there's inherent value in all types of integrations, the company's Product Operations team considers fully automated payroll integrations—those that require zero day-to-day manual work—their north star metric. Eliminating the need to download files, check date ranges, validate data, and more has a big impact on efficiency. Drew shared that fully automated integrations allow Human Interest to process payroll up to 4x faster and make it so the team is 3x more likely to hit their Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ensuring customers get the experience they expect.
“If we were 100% relying on manual work by our Operations team to process payroll data, we would not have a sustainable business,” Drew said. “We’re at nearly 100% of our SLA to invest participants’ contributions within five business days. Without automation, we’d be at about 30% because the Operations team would just be underwater.”
“If we were 100% relying on manual work by our Operations team to process payroll data, we would not have a sustainable business."
Human Interest has built an impressive arsenal of integrations on their own, but found they weren’t able to build bi-directional connections to every payroll provider their customers use.
Before partnering with Finch, Human Interest was using another third-party vendor to access sponsor data from two commonly used payroll providers that proved challenging to integrate with directly. However, the team ran into issues with the outsourced connections, which forced them to route most of the work through the Operations team.
“It’s the worst-case scenario,” Drew said, due to security concerns and inefficiency. “It’s not a tenable solution; it doesn’t scale. We don’t want to keep hiring people to keep up with revenue growth. We would rather take our resources and dedicate them to good customer management, troubleshooting, and exploring better opportunities.”
Human Interest needed a reliable solution that would take the menial day-to-day work off their plate without passing the buck to their customers.
In early 2022, Human Interest partnered with Finch to get better access to the data their Operations team had been manually collecting and validating. Since then, they’ve launched a second integration with Finch for a separate payroll provider, and have begun to explore write-back functionality that will allow them to achieve full automation for both integrations.
“The ease and support Finch has provided is what laid the foundation for us to consider Finch for additional payroll connections,” Drew said. “Going deeper is our biggest priority. We don’t want to just roll an integration out to say we have an integration. We want it to actually provide true value, both to our internal teams and more importantly, to the end user.”
By going through Finch, Human Interest wasn’t just able to build previously inaccessible integrations—Drew also estimates that the time to build was cut by 66%, primarily because the discovery process was already complete. When a single integration normally occupies 25% of the internal development team, that time savings is significant.
“So much of what you’re doing when building a new integration is just trying to find all the weird things hiding around corners that you don’t know about. Finch is eliminating that work and giving us a level of confidence that we’re going to get an integration that works,” Drew said. “With that time, there’s a whole lot of other things we’re able to do. We’re able to make the product better.”
Automation saves the Operations team time and resources, but it also goes a long way in providing a better user experience for sponsors—especially when it comes to onboarding.
Human Interest’s mission is to make it easier for all employees to save for retirement. Traditionally, SMBs have seldom offered retirement plans because they’ve been expensive, complicated, and required lots of administrative work. To combat this, Human Interest strives to make onboarding and plan administration as easy as possible.
Enabling more self-service onboarding is a big goal for Drew’s team and a major part of their plan to establish fully automated integrations through Finch. “Sponsors shouldn’t have to get on more than five phone calls with their 401(k) recordkeeper and payroll provider just to set up a plan,” Drew said.
With Finch Connect, Human Interest’s customers are able to grant access to their payroll system in minutes. Drew anticipates that in the coming months, Human Interest will leverage Finch to augment their in-house integrations to enable that same kind of seamless onboarding to more payroll providers.
The way Drew sees it, Finch’s Unified Employment API is another tool in Human Interest’s arsenal. There hasn’t been a drive to replace Finch’s connections with direct, in-house integrations because Finch provides all the functionality they need.
“We’ve built hundreds of integrations ourselves and we’re comfortable doing it when needed; but when we’re deciding where to dedicate developer resources, we ask ourselves how our current solution is working. If we can use a third party that will take work off our plate and still deliver the same end-user experience, why wouldn’t we?”
“We’ve built hundreds of integrations ourselves...[but] if we can use a third party that will take work off our plate and still deliver the same end-user experience, why wouldn’t we?”
The retirement industry is poised to see massive growth in plans offered by SMBs, largely driven by SECURE Act 2.0 and new state mandates that require employers to offer a retirement plan. For Human Interest, that’s a great opportunity that makes payroll integrations—and their ability to scale—more important than ever.
Drew noted that one of Finch’s most valuable traits is the scalability of its integrations. “We don’t have to revisit a Finch integration when it grows. We feel very confident in what’s already being provided to us.”
With nearly 6,000 payroll providers serving the SMB market, Drew sees plenty of opportunity to continue growing the number of providers Human Interest can support with Finch.
“With Finch, part of the win is that we feel like we’re actually along for the ride,” Drew said. “There’s an element of collaboration that I’ve loved—so I see that continuing.”