Jeremy Zhang

Employers felt the repercussions of a slew of macro trends and technology changes in 2023: workforce volatility, challenging economic conditions, growing data security threats, and the rise of generative AI.

To adapt, employers turned to technology, seeking fast, user-friendly, and integrated tools to automate manual tasks and enable their teams to focus on high-priority work. More than ever before, they relied on their platforms’ ability to access and share employment data that has historically been locked within systems of record.

Since 2020, Finch has been committed to democratizing access to the otherwise complex, closed, and fragmented employment ecosystem so innovators are empowered to build powerful new solutions. Now, we’re looking back at what we accomplished together in 2023—and sharing our big goals for the year to come.

2023 Highlights

In 2023, we continued to expand the breadth and depth of Finch’s integration coverage and took our first step into write-back capabilities with the public launch of our newest product, Deductions. We hyper-focused on the developer experience to make connecting to Finch as seamless as possible, so our customers can focus on investing in their core product and bringing more value to employers.

A few major milestones helped us get here—from raising our Series B and expanding our Finch team to growing our network of partners and expanding our data coverage in new ways. 

Let’s take a closer look:

Investing in our team to build the #1 Unified Employment API

Finch started the year strong with a $40 million Series B round led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures, with participation from PruVen Capital, Altman Capital, and QED Investors. A few months later, we received an additional investment from Intuit Ventures, reflecting their trust and interest in Finch’s aim to enable Intuit Quickbooks’ partners and small business customers to connect applications to their payroll data. 

This new capital helped us support our customers in building new, innovative use cases across HR, fintech, and benefits verticals.

Our product is only as good as the team that stands behind it—so we invested in that team, growing our headcount by 67% to 80 employees. These reinforcements helped us reach new heights in 2023, like… 

3M+ employees connected through Finch

Since we started Finch in 2020, we’ve connected more than 3 million employees across nearly 40,000 employers. 

• Bigger network → more connections Finch integrates with 200+ HRIS & Payroll providers, covering 88% of all U.S. employers.
• More connections = more API calls Last year alone, we handled more than 1 billion API calls—that’s 31.7 per second!
• More API calls demand more reliability We understand that our customers place their trust in us when they connect to Finch’s API, so we worked hard to increase our field coverage and reliability in 2023. I’m proud to say that those efforts resulted in 99.99% uptime.

Launched new product to general access: Deductions API

Traditionally, for benefits providers, employer onboarding and enrollment has been a long, tedious process requiring a series of manual operations, heavy administrative burden, and coordination across multiple teams. Our recent survey of over 1,000 HR professionals revealed that HR teams invest 3-5 hours per payroll cycle to ensure accurate deductions and contributions for employees.

To automate this process, we launched a new product: Deductions APIs. This offering enables benefits applications to create and update employer contributions and employee deductions in their customers’ payroll systems, enabling use cases like automatic enrollment. We’re proud to be the only unified API offering it today.

Employers took notice: Deductions saw a 9x increase in adoption since its beta release. By leveraging this product, some of the largest retirement and benefits companies in the country offered employers greater compliance capabilities with new legislation like the SECURE Act 2.0, providing peace of mind for employers and an easier enrollment experience for employees.

This was just our first foray into Deductions—looking ahead, we plan to expand our coverage of popular payroll systems to serve more employers, broaden our deduction type support, and support complex edge cases like tiered and catch-up contributions. 

Announcing best-in-class partnerships with top employment providers

In 2023, we forged partnerships with leading employment providers, unlocking read and write capabilities to these employment systems of record.

• Gusto — An all-in-one HR platform, Gusto serves 200,000 small business employers and has been rated the Best Payroll Software of 2023 by the U.S. News and World Report.
• Paycor — Paycor’s HR platform modernizes people management for 40,000 employers ranging in size from 1–5,000 employees and had the highest user adoption among enterprise solutions in 2023, according to G2.
• Personio — Personio’s 6,000 employers across the globe benefit from automated and simplified HR tasks through a single platform. 
• UKG — UKG is an all-in-one suite of human capital management (HCM) applications used by 80,000 employers that has been recognized as a top-rated solution by G2, TrustRadius, and more.

Partnerships like these were huge stepping stones toward our broader vision of building a more connected experience for employers and accelerating innovation in the employment space.

Delivering an improved developer experience

Our mission is to democratize access to employment data, so it’s important that we make it easy for developers to connect applications to Finch. We introduced several features this year to provide more timely access to data, help developers build to Finch better and faster, and expand our data coverage in new ways.

• Real-time status updates with Finch webhooks for account update events, job completion events, and data change events
• Data syncs user interface (UI) to give developers, support teams, and product managers a quickly accessible dashboard containing the status of scheduled and requested data syncs across all connected customers
• Data Refresh endpoint for developers to request new data whenever they need it
• Provider Sandbox and backend software development kits (SDK) in multiple languages to help developers test integrations before building and spend less time on boilerplate code
• Request Forwarding to enable developers to make direct requests to employment systems and access any functionality that is natively supported by a provider’s API—even those outside of the scope of our standardized data models

2024 Goals and Plans

A successful 2023 paved the way for a brighter 2024—and we’re incredibly excited for what's to come. This year, we'll scale Finch’s product offering to accommodate greater coverage and more complicated setups, dive into payment operations, and expand across more employment systems. Here’s a preview of what we have up our sleeves for this year:

• Grow the Finch Provider Network — In 2024, we’ll expand the coverage and number of providers we support. At the same time, we’re committing to forging new partnerships, further increasing our API’s reliability, and supporting new, complex setups.
• Go deep with read-write capabilities — Deductions was our foray into productizing critical write-back capabilities from benefits providers to payroll systems; but we’re not stopping there. There is so much more value that we can offer in the employment stack. In partnership with our current customers, we’re exploring new offerings in payment operations, such as employee earnings and time and attendance.
• Expand to employment systems beyond HR and payroll — The rise of the Open Employment Ecosystem is inevitable. In the same way Open Finance has unleashed a new era of innovation in fintech, we believe a more accessible and connected employment ecosystem is a win-win-win for employment systems of record, third-party applications, and the employers they serve.

To catalyze this revolution in employment data access, we started with HR and payroll. But we’ll need to go beyond these systems of record and connect with new segments to unite the entire employment stack. We’re looking forward to exploring those next steps—stay tuned.

Build with Finch

In 2023, we worked alongside our customers to deliver the infrastructure that connects the employment industry, helping employers own their mission-critical data. This year, we’ll build on our momentum with continued investment in our talent, our resources, and our products to create an employment ecosystem where data and payment flow is safe, fast, and convenient.

We’re always looking to help innovators address crucial problems across the ecosystem and get to market faster. Get in touch with us or sign up for free.

Today we’re proud to announce additional funding led by Intuit Ventures, the venture capital fund of Intuit. Intuit’s QuickBooks payroll is the #1 payroll provider for small businesses.

The employment data ecosystem was built in an era of data silos. Even today, connectivity remains a challenge with the standard practices to share mission-critical employment data bottlenecked by flat files, emails, and even faxes. We are in the early stages of an industry-wide evolution toward a more connected, secure ecosystem allowing for innovative solutions across fintech, HR tech, compliance, insurance, and benefits to proliferate.

Today marks another step toward that inevitable, connected future. Just four months following our $40M Series B investment announcement, we have raised additional capital from Intuit Ventures. With over 1.6 million businesses utilizing Intuit’s payroll in fiscal 2022, Quickbooks is the leading payroll provider for small businesses. Their deep expertise in business software, combined with their proven track record of building 3rd party application marketplaces made them a natural fit for Finch as we continue to unify the employment data ecosystem.

"We are constantly looking to invest in innovative companies that are solving critical problems our customers face.” said Adam Coccari, Managing Director of Intuit Ventures. “Finch’s unified API currently enables our partners and small business customers to seamlessly connect apps to their data in Intuit QuickBooks payroll so the products that they love work together. We look forward to collaborating with Finch as they build deeper integrations to serve developers and our joint customers.”

We’re particularly excited by what this means for customers and end users — we are well on our way to building a future of employment that’s open, connected, and programmable. Today’s employers are demanding their systems of record speak to one another so they can get the best insights into their operations. By opening up the Employment Data Ecosystem, Finch can unlock the full potential of the suite of solutions that utilize HR, payroll and benefits data. This investment from Intuit, a major player in the employment data ecosystem, further strengthens our position as the leading employment data API.

Join our team to help shape the future of the employment ecosystem! To learn more about Finch’s solutions, talk to our sales team or sign up for free today.

Today, we're excited to announce that Finch has raised $40M in our Series B round, co-led by General Catalyst and Menlo Ventures, with additional investments from QED, PruVen, and Altman Capital.

The workforce is the backbone of the U.S. economy. From retirement to health insurance to mental health, the responsibilities of employers have increased significantly over the years. Despite the challenges posed by the macro backdrop, U.S. employment has been growing steadily, with the unemployment rate at its lowest in 54 years.

However, the employment ecosystem faces significant challenges due to a lack of data accessibility. Over 580M+ U.S. employment records and $15T of funds are processed across 20,000+ employment data systems, including payroll, HRIS, benefits administration, and others. Moreover, the ecosystem lacks necessary connectivity, with records mainly passed via manual data entry, SFTP, and emails filled with sensitive information. We are here to change that by making it easy to access data and direct payments across the sector with our unified employment API.

We've made significant progress since announcing our Series A just eight months ago—

• Several months of positive cash flow and a 12x increase in revenue since the company's Series A round announced in June 2022.
• Over 2 million employees connected through the Finch platform.
• Over 60 employees globally, representing 4x Y/Y growth
• New partnerships with leading employment platforms, including BambooHR, HiBob, and others yet to be announced.

With this funding, we will accelerate connectivity across the employment data ecosystem and help employers and employees use the products and services they need to grow and thrive. We're putting this capital to work by investing in new and existing products and expanding our team to support customers and partners across the HR, Fintech, and Benefits verticals.

Our vision is to build a future where employment is connected and programmable. With Finch, applications can instantly gain compatibility with 200+ employment systems to provide products and services to employers.

Join our team to help shape the future of employment!

Sam (he/him) brings over 10 years of experience building and leading post-sales organizations from customer success to account management. He was most recently a Senior Director of Customer Success at Mezmo where he tripled the team and contributed to a 3x increase in ARR in 3 years. During his tenure he was responsible for unlocking functional value and growth for customers across their journey with Mezmo. He oversaw Customer Success Management, Renewal Operations, and Solutions Architects.

I’ve been lucky to work at stellar companies at various stages that prioritized customer trust, from AdRoll to Segment to Mezmo. Finch fit that pattern and I’m excited to build best-practices and a world-class team so we can scale trust at this key inflection point for the company’s future. I look forward to working with an amazingly dedicated team and pushing the organization to deliver the best customer experience possible.

At Finch, Sam is focused on building and overseeing a world-class technical success and support team. For him, that means cultivating clear processes to handle customer issues and feedback, hiring and retaining people who deeply empathize with developers, and unlocking new insights into how customers use our product so we continue to build for evolving workflows.

Pairing his east coast grit with west coast creativity, Sam is a proud New Jerseyan, who has called San Francisco home for the past 15 years. In his free time, he loves playing and watching basketball, taking to the mountains, and traveling with his wife.

Interested in joining Sam at Finch? We’re hiring! Head over to our careers page to check out our open positions.

In our latest whitepaper, we explore SFTP vs API integrations and discuss which is right for your business.

It’s no secret that data connectivity has changed the way businesses operate.  It seems that every week, there is a new app that plugs into the systems businesses use every day. These innovations have changed the game for users, making interoperability between systems a need-to-have. For software providers, flexible and plentiful integrations are more essential than ever. 

Why Employment Data Transfer and Integration Methods Matter

Employee and HR data has traditionally been one of most challenging use cases for data transfer. Employment data, the bulk of which is usually stored in HRIS and payroll systems, must be handled carefully and securely in order to abide by compliance rules and regulations protecting the collection, storage, and usage of sensitive, personal data. 

So what is considered employment data? Employment data is any information about a company and the individuals within it. More specifically information about the company itself (EIN, legal name, HQ address), the company org chart (employee count, managers, departments), or about individuals (preferred name, contact information, employment status, income and pay history, benefits data, etc.).

Businesses rely on employment data to manage their workforce effectively. It’s essential for them to keep this data up-to-date and organized throughout all of the systems they use each day. Any software providers that want to sell to businesses must think strategically about how to collect this employment data from various sources of truth in an organization. While the majority of this data is housed in HRIS and payroll systems, there are thousands of potential systems to consider. There is also no standard way of categorizing or sharing data between systems, which means the transfer of this data is usually (at least partially) manual.

B2B applications looking to leverage the power of this employment data often consider two integration approaches—SFTP vs API. While SFTP has been more ubiquitous historically, an increasing number of platforms are looking to APIs for their scalability, security, and speed.

SFTP vs API vs Integration: Which is Right for You?

SFTP and API are two possible methods of integration between systems. Before diving into the benefits of an SFTP integration vs an API integration, let’s quickly define each method.

What is SFTP? 

In order to understand SFTP, you need to understand what FTP is. FTP stands for a file transfer protocol, which supports the transfer of files between a client and a server. SFTP, or Secure File Transfer Protocol, is a process that uses shell encryption to allow businesses to send and receive sensitive information such as employment data in confidence. SFTP emerged in 1997 as a way of transferring data between parties securely. It requires data to be updated manually (via flat file, CSV, JSON, etc.), encoded, then transmitted through a secure channel between two platforms. You receive an email notification when the file is ready to download. 

Because an SFTP integration is convenient for processing many files quickly, it’s often used for bulk file transfers. It also allows businesses to send and receive a wide variety of files. SFTP integrations only need a single connection to initiate the file transfer, and an internet connection is unnecessary.

However, SFTP has its downsides. First, it relies on manual data entry, which must be constantly validated to avoid errors. This is a tedious process that wastes time and resources. Additionally, SFTP doesn’t allow for the transfer of data in real time. The moment a file is uploaded to the server, it is theoretically out of date. Depending on the use case, this can limit the usefulness of data sharing altogether. If accuracy, timeliness, and speed are essential, SFTP falls short. 

What is an API ? 

APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces, are ways for two applications to communicate with each other. APIs standardize a communication pathway between software to exchange data and other information regardless of the underlying programming languages they are built on. APIs make it easy to push and request data instantly, providing real-time visibility into data shared between systems. Once an API is implemented, there is no manual download, restructuring, or error checking that needs to be done. If implemented correctly, the data flows seamlessly between systems.

The Downsides of SFTP vs API Integrations

So why API vs SFTP for the transfer of data? We outline just a few reasons below. For the full explanation, make sure to download our whitepaper. 

SFTPs and APIs both make it possible to transfer data between systems securely, however, APIs have a few key strengths over SFTP, especially when used to transfer employment data. Here are 3 reasons to consider API vs SFTP:

1. Improve data security

Even SFTP lacks security controls to handle today’s cyber threats. Recent research reveals that more than 400 million files from FTP servers are publicly available online, and the average cost per lost or stolen record is $146 USD. When files are exposed, SFTP does not log security violations or authenticate users – basic capabilities you need to help detect and stop breaches. Encryption is also an afterthought requiring extra steps and IT expertise, making it difficult, expensive and time-consuming to send files safely.

2. Gain real-time access to employment data

With APIs, you can get instant access to all the information you need. A live and continuous connection means that your application can constantly refresh the sync, meaning that you will always be working with the most recent version of your data. This way different teams within your company can collaborate effectively since they have access to the same set of information.

3. Improve the customer experience and reduce errors

One of the key downsides of SFTP is the need for employees to manage sensitive data manually. When downloading, updating, and re-uploading data files, there are many opportunities for errors to be introduced to the system. SFTP then allows crucial issues to perpetuate. When and if errors are found, they require several calls and emails with multiple parties to correct. This is not only frustrating for customers, it drains your HR administrators time and resources, and introduces errors that can wreak havoc on your systems.

Which Method is Best for You?

Download our SFTP vs API whitepaper for details on which method is best for you based on your unique business needs.

In it, you’ll find:

• The differences between SFTP integrations and API integrations
• Pros and cons of implementing each
• Ideal scenarios for implementing SFTP integrations
• Examples of innovative use cases powered by APIs

How Finch can help

If you’re interested in exploring an API integration for your application, Finch’s dynamic, unified API offers read-and-write access and abstracts away inconsistencies across systems for optimal usability no matter the source. We also handle routine maintenance, bug fixes, and the hard work of keeping up to date with the latest HRIS and payroll platforms, allowing your engineering team to focus on developing the differentiating features that set your application apart from the competition.

Finch is the API of choice for employment system integrations because we are:

• Comprehensive: Finch integrates with over 200 employment systems (more than 4x the competition)
• Developer-friendly: We focus on developers and empower them to create world-class solutions.
• Reliable: The Finch API does the best job of interacting with and maintaining connectivity with employment systems.
• Secure: Finch is a pass-through system, and is SOC2 Type 2, CCPA, and GDPR compliant.
• Efficient: Finch connects you with 180+ HRIS and payroll systems through one API—4x more than any other platform.
• Enterprise-ready: Our technology is built for large-scale synchronization with thousands of businesses.

Register for a test account now to explore innovative ways to leverage employment data with Finch.

Our newest integration, Wave Payroll, is now live, further extending our Canadian provider coverage. Finch can now connect you to over 170 HRIS and payroll systems, giving you access to the employment data necessary to create the integrated experiences your customers are looking for.

Wave: all-in-one money management made easy

Founded in 2010, Wave began its journey as an accounting solution with a simple mission: helping small businesses easily manage their finances. Since then, the Canadian company has expanded its initial accounting offering into a suite of products that services more than 1 million customers.

With Wave Payroll, small businesses can quickly manage employee onboarding, tax profiles, employment records, and more while providing access to critical aspects of their business from its all-in-one platform.

How do I get access to the Wage Payroll integration?

For Finch customers, the Wave Payroll integration is already available. If you’re not a Finch customer, and you’re interested in leveraging employment data, sign up for free access to our sandbox and get your API keys today.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll gain access to all 170+ HR and payroll providers we’re integrated with through our unified API, including QuickBooks and ADP RUN. Our team of experts handles all technical requirements for each integration, so you don’t have to worry about updates or maintenance.

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If we had to describe last month in one word, it would be expansive, with several integration launches, extended field support, and an alternative integration auth method. Check out what’s new!

New automated API integrations added to coverage

Humaans

Humaans is a modern HR system focused on modularity and compatibility with other HR platforms. While support for Humaans is part of our larger strategy to grow our coverage in European markets, Humaans has also begun to expand globally, unlocking myriad new employers internationally.

SageHR

SageHR has grown to support businesses of up to 125 employees in 1,200 cities worldwide. As the company enters the next stage of its evolution, adding new modules and features specifically designed to scale, we’re even more excited to support integrations with SageHR accounts.

Sapling

A relatively young player in the HR space, Sapling was founded in 2016 and expanded market share quickly, eventually being acquired by Kallidus in 2020. With offices in the U.S. and Canada, Sapling services hundreds of employers around the world, and is a welcome addition to our coverage network.

Support for new inclusive field — preferredName

Another significant development in our ever-deepening field support, preferredName is a crucial field for many players on the Finch platform.

Rather than relying on legal names only, using an employee’s configured preferred name allows applications to make employees feel more comfortable and, in sensitive circumstances, can have a significant impact on belonging and trust. Preferred name is now available via the individual endpoint for all of Finch’s automated API integrations!

Expanded Paychex Flex deduction types

Finch has expanded support for deduction types in our pay-statement endpoint for Paychex Flex. Many new deduction types are available, including 401k, Roth 401k, 401k Loan, FSA Dependent Care, Section 125 Medical, and more.

This is of notable importance for retirement and benefits applications, which rely on this information to validate that deductions have been run, as well as tax credit companies, who use deduction information to determine tax credit eligibility.

Alternative auth option with Zenefits API token

Finch is constantly making improvements to our existing integrations, and Zenefits is one of Finch’s most-used and longest-standing examples. Zenefits recently introduced their own API, which allows Zenefits customers to create an API token in their dashboard for development use. This provides a faster and more secure way to access Zenefits data.

Employers can now enter their API information directly via Finch Connect. To do this, they simply select Zenefits as their provider, and select the “Using SSO? Enter an API Token Instead” button at the bottom of the login page. This will direct them to enter their API information.

That's all for this monthly update! Stay on the lookout for our next monthly product update. If you want to get your hands on the latest and greatest Finch features sign up for free access here.

Our latest HRIS integration, SageHR, is up and running, adding yet another data source to our overall data coverage network of 150+ HR and payroll systems. For Finch customers, that means even more opportunities to create seamless, interconnected digital experiences.

SageHR: a modular HR platform

What started as a leave management solution has since expanded to include a range of modular HR solutions that flex with the unique and changing needs of modern employers. One of the unique aspects of SageHR is its built-in connectivity with the Sage family of accounting and payroll solutions. This is part of the reason why the platform has grown to support customers in 1,200 cities worldwide for small businesses that have up to 125 employees. Now, in the latest stage of its evolution, the company is adding new modules and features specifically designed to scale—ensuring a seamless HR experience regardless of company size.

How do I get access to the SageHR integration?

For Finch customers, the SageHR integration is automatically accessible. If you’re not a Finch customer but are interested in becoming one, enter your email address here and get your API keys today.

Once you’ve signed up, you’ll gain access to all 150+ HR and payroll providers we’re integrated with through our universal API, including QuickBooks and ADP RUN. Our team also handles all technical requirements for each integration, so you don’t have to worry about updates or maintenance.

We’re excited to announce our latest whitepaper, Build vs. Buy to address the question:

Should I build employment integrations in-house or outsource them?

If you’re asking yourself this question, you already know that data connectivity has the power to transform every industry in the world—and few businesses are in the dark when it comes to understanding the importance of breaking down the data silos currently impeding their productivity and innovation. In turn, B2B applications are hurrying to bridge the chasms between the systems in their customers’ tech stack. Their goal? To create superior user experiences and unlock automation and insights that set them apart from their competitors.

Increasingly, the basis of those bridges is API integrations, and one of the most important datasets to access is housed in employment systems like HRIS and payroll. Determining how to approach employment system integrations is a critical decision for any business, and different business scenarios dictate different considerations as you explore your integration options.

Maybe you’re at one of the following stages:

• Launch — You are starting from ground zero and need to decide whether to buy or build in the first place.
• Scale — You already built a few key integrations in-house and are trying to determine if outsourcing remaining integrations and their maintenance would be a more prudent next move.
• Status Quo — You already have an adequate data sync solution, fueled by a flat-file feed and hodgepodge of APIs, that meets your basic needs and are wondering why you should entertain the idea of outsourcing integrations at all. Or perhaps you even recognize that digital transformation is ultimately necessary but wonder if it’s an initiative you can keep internal.

In Finch’s latest whitepaper, Build vs. Buy we explore all of the considerations at each stage and more to help you arrive at the best integration approach for your B2B application.

Team up with Finch

Finch does the hard work of integrating with HRIS and payroll providers to facilitate the secure, permissioned flow of critical business data. Our dynamic, unified API offers read-and-write access and abstracts away inconsistencies across systems for optimal usability no matter the source.

Finch is quickly becoming the API of choice for employment system integrations because we are:

• Developer-friendly: We focus on developers and empower them to create world-class solutions.
• Reliable: Our API does the best job of interacting with and maintaining connectivity with employment systems.
• Secure: Finch is a pass-through system, and is SOC2 Type 2, CCPA, and GDPR compliant.
• Efficient: Finch connects you with 150+ HRIS and payroll systems through one API, 4x more than any other platform.
• Enterprise-ready: Our technology is built for large-scale synchronization with thousands of employers.

Reach out to our team to explore ways to access employment data with our unified API by contacting us here.

Finch’s newest integration, Humaans, is open for access. Our coverage network now stands at 150+ HRIS and payroll systems, ensuring our customers stay connected to the global employment ecosystem.

Humaans: a new approach to people operations

Founded in 2020, Humaans is a human resources information system (HRIS) that acts as a single source of truth for all staffing operations. The platform provides users with a holistic interface for employee onboarding and ongoing people management—giving them access to powerful insights like company growth metrics and payroll information. The platform initially catered to European companies but has rapidly expanded to help global organizations with their people operations.

Eschewing the all-in-one model of HR software for a more dynamic approach, Humaans integrates with leading HR SaaS platforms, allowing employers to mix and match services based on their needs. This adaptability is part of the reason Humaans is growing quickly.

How do I get access to the Humaans integration?

For existing Finch customers, access to Humaans is already available. If you’re not yet a customer and are interested in gaining access, enter your email address on our homepage here, and get your API keys today.

With our universal API, you’ll gain access to 150+ HRIS and payroll integrations and counting, including Quickbooks and ADP RUN. Our team also handles all ongoing maintenance and updates so you can spend your time focusing on building out your platform, creating exceptional user experiences, and fostering stickier customer relationships.

Sapling, an HRIS platform, is now accessible via Finch’s automated API. That brings our coverage to 150+ HRIS and payroll systems—each one helping your app better connect with your customers.

Sapling: a people management platform for modern HR teams

Sapling was founded in 2016 to fulfill a simple goal: amplify connectivity for people operations teams around the globe. The platform does this by utilizing AI-powered automation and predictive insights that provide HR teams with a powerful, data-driven experience that helps them foster workplace culture and drive impact. In January 2020, the platform was acquired by Kallidus to complement a full suite of human capital management (HCM) software.

A best-in-class employee onboarding platform, Sapling streamlines complicated HR processes, allowing employers to visualize relationships between people, teams, and departments; manage time-off policies; and unify global data effortlessly—all from within a single system.

How do I get access to the Sapling integration?

Current Finch customers can enjoy immediate access to the Sapling integration. For those interested in becoming a customer and gaining access, simply enter your email address on our homepage here, and get your API keys today.

Our universal API provides access to 150+ HR and payroll integrations and counting, including Quickbooks and ADP Run. As for ongoing maintenance, updates, and dealing with edge cases, there’s no need to worry; our dedicated development team handles everything, so you can spend your time on your core product.

Our newest integration, Personio, is now open for access. This latest offering increases our data coverage to over 150 HR and payroll systems, ensuring developers can continue to provide their customers with innovative and seamless digital experiences.

Personio: people investment strategists

Founded in 2015, Personio is a comprehensive platform dedicated to helping businesses automate and optimize their core HR processes in order to save time. That means making HR as transparent and efficient as possible. So far, Personio has done just that for over 6,000 customers across Europe.

In 2021, the company launched its latest offering: People Workflow Automation. This new product helps companies drive productivity across all aspects of their business by connecting tools and teams outside of a traditional HR scope and consolidating all employee information in one place. Innovations like this have helped Personio build a leading HR platform, valued today at $8.5 billion

How do I get access to the Personio integration?

Finch customers automatically have access to the Personio integration. If you’re not yet a customer and want to gain access, enter your email address on our homepage here, and get your API keys today.

Our universal API provides access to 150+ payroll integrations and counting, including Quickbooks and ADP RUN. Maintenance, updates, and edge cases are all handled by our first-rate team, so your team can focus on building exceptional experiences.  

Announcing self-serve onboarding

We built Finch to unlock access to employment data and are committed to creating a best-in-class developer experience. Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our self-serve sign-up, which makes it easy for innovative developers to get API keys and start evaluating the benefits of employment data for their product.

Connect to employment systems in minutes

For many developers looking to leverage employment data, it takes months to gain access and build integrations one by one. Even when those integrations are built, the process can still involve flat files, complex authentication, and mismatched data scopes. Finch condenses that entire process into a few days by unifying all employment systems through a single API with normalized data and permissions. In the end, your customers can sync their employment system with your product in minutes (though we’ve seen it happen in as little as 30 seconds).

Sign up to access our docs, sandbox, and dashboard

Now, instead of having to go through our sales team to access our API keys, we’ve overhauled our onboarding process, so you can start building in minutes. Getting up and running is easy and only takes three steps:

1. Head over to the Get API Keys button on our homepage.
2. Enter your contact and account creation information.
3. Generate sandbox credentials.

In only a few minutes, you’ll have everything you need to start testing with Finch’s sandbox.

Once you’ve created an account, you’ll get access to our sandbox, which includes multiple test instances representing varying employer sizes, a dashboard with connections monitoring and audit logs, and documentation that sets you up for success.

Launching into production

Once you’re done testing out the platform and are ready to go to production with live customers, reach out to our team. We’ll make sure you have production keys and check all the boxes related to production readiness and compliance so that you can offer the best data-syncing experience to your customers.

Gain access to Finch today and supercharge your application experience with employment data.

At Finch, our mission is to empower innovators to access the global employment ecosystem. Since starting the company in late 2020, we’ve been excited about building a future in which the employment sector is both connected and programmable.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Finch has raised a $15 million Series A, led by Menlo Ventures, alongside General Catalyst, Bedrock, Y Combinator, and Sempervirens. We also brought on founders and executives from Gusto, ADP, Namely, Justworks, Workday, and other employment providers. Additionally, we are excited to have Matt Murphy, Managing Director at Menlo Ventures, join our board of directors, and Croom Beatty, Partner at Menlo Ventures, and Alex Tran, Managing Director at General Catalyst, join as Board Observers.

Enabling connectivity with Finch

The employment sector has undergone an important transformation over the past two years. Employers, financial technology, benefit providers, and HR applications have had to meet the rising expectations of today’s workforce. Adapting to these expectations requires robust connectivity to employment systems (HR, payroll, and benefits). Given the industry’s fragmentation (there are 6,000+ employment providers in the U.S.) and the complexity of the underlying data and functions, such an infrastructure did not exist prior to Finch.

Without that infrastructure, many companies have been forced to resort to CSV uploads and FTP. Other companies have opted to spend millions in development costs, alongside years of business development efforts, to build one-off integrations. For example, the co-founder and CTO of Human Interest, a prominent 401(k) provider, said that building payroll and HR connectivity was one of the most time-consuming parts of their engineering effort, but it was essential to their success.

What they needed was pre-built, universal connectivity that would allow them to reallocate their focus to their core product. Over the past year, Finch took on that responsibility, integrating with employment systems across HR, payroll, and benefits. We now provide mission-critical infrastructure powering applications across hundreds of B2B fintech, benefits, HR, and enterprise verticals. After a little over a year since our public launch, Finch has achieved multiple major milestones:

• Compatibility with 150+ employment systems
• Coverage of >88% of U.S. employers
• 5M+ daily API calls
• 10K+ employers connected to Finch, from small start-ups to publicly traded companies
• 10x YoY revenue growth

Powering the future of employment

Finch will continue expanding our connectivity and building blocks to enable our customers to create more innovation for employers and employees. With this new financing, we are focusing on three critical components of our infrastructure:

• Expanding coverage— Finch is already the leading infrastructure in terms of coverage and will continue down the path to be compatible with all 6,000+ providers in the industry.
• Powering the rails— Late last year, we launched the ability to manage deductions and contributions into payroll systems, a valuable product for all benefits providers. Deductions and contributions are just the beginning, as we will be expanding further down the stack into ACH to employers, reimbursements, garnishment, draft payroll, eligibility verification, and other segments that directly impact money movements.
• Connecting the employee lifecycle— Finch will build data pipes across all types of systems across the industry. We started initially with HR and payroll, the source of truth for employment records, but are continuing to add additional data models across benefits, equity, time and attendance, identity, and more.

The next chapter

We are grateful to our team members, customers, and investors who have supported us through this journey. While we are incredibly proud of how far we have come, we are still in the early innings of the employment sector’s digital transformation. As we look to support the massive growth and change that will entail, we’ll accelerate our investments in building infrastructure that enables an open, friendly, and secure data ecosystem.

If you want to have an incredible impact and the opportunity to change an industry, join our team. We’re hiring for all roles!

Finch has added a dynamic new leader, with Oz Ruiz heading up the engineering team.

Oz (he/him) has over 16 years of experience as a software engineer across different roles and responsibilities. Before joining Finch, he helped a subscription platform, Recharge Payments, grow their engineering team from 14 to 170+ people. He also created and ran departments for R&D, platform engineering, infrastructure, DevOps, analytics, and compliance. With his leadership skills, the company reached $2.1 billion in valuation and secured a $227 million Series B, surging 10x in size and revenue in the course of just four years.

I’m excited to do it all again—and better—with Finch. Everyone, from the founders to the engineers, are heavily invested in our organization’s success, and that gives us a solid foundation for growth. I’m looking forward to pushing Finch to the level I know it can achieve, and doing so with fantastic, highly motivated people will make it that much more satisfying.

At Finch, Oz is focused on building and overseeing a world-class engineering team. For him, that means cultivating high-velocity product teams, hiring and retaining people who care about their customers and coworkers, implementing and scaling repeatable processes, and instilling operational excellence as a core value.

A fluent Spanish speaker, Oz was born in Puerto Rico, grew up in Florida, and spent his early professional years in Denver. Recently, he moved back to the Tampa Bay area with his wife and three children to be closer to family (and prime fishing spots). If you ever see him out and about, buy him a bourbon—it’s his drink of choice.

Interested in joining Oz at Finch? We’re hiring! Head over to our careers page to check out our open positions.

Developers using Finch now have access to our latest integration, Sequoia One, putting our total data coverage at 150+ HR and payroll systems (and counting). With this latest addition, Finch customers have even more opportunity to offer seamless digital experiences to their customers.

Sequoia One: people investment strategists

Founded in 2001, Sequoia has long been committed to helping businesses foster supportive work environments and benefit packages for their employees. In 2014, the company doubled down on its commitment by launching Sequoia One—a professional employer organization (PEO) dedicated to serving the needs of innovative startups looking to outsource HR, payroll, and benefits.

Today, Sequoia One takes care of HR-related functions so its clients can focus on their mission. But Sequoia One doesn’t just alleviate administrative and regulatory burdens—it helps its employers optimize their benefits packages, expertly manage their hybrid workforce, and uncover automations to build a winning, seamless, and wholly scalable HR experience that attracts and retains superlative talent. At last count, Sequoia One boasts more than 800 fast-growing companies as clients.

How do I get access to the Sequoia One integration?

If you’re already a Finch customer, you automatically have access to the Sequoia One integration. If you’re not, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.

With Finch, you get access to all 150+ major North American payroll providers we’re integrated with, including QuickBooks and ADP RUN. And because our team owns all technical requirements for each integration and provides you with one universal API, you don’t have to worry about updates, maintenance, or issues.

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Runae Lee: Head of Partnerships

Runae (he/him) most recently worked at Checkr as Director of Business Development, where he helped build the channel program and worked closely with leading players in HR tech along the way.

From my days at Checkr, and before that, at Ernst & Young, I saw firsthand how fragmented the HR tech ecosystem is,” said Runae. “Unifying the HR tech space with modern and thoughtful APIs represents the future in terms of how new products are built and how employers expect their payroll, HR, and other solutions to ‘just work’ together. Finch’s vision is an exciting piece of that puzzle, and the opportunity to work with such a talented and humble team to bring this vision to life was too compelling not to say yes to.

At Finch, Runae is applying his business development experience to crafting our partner strategy and securing partnerships with the most innovative companies in the employment data ecosystem. He will also be hiring for roles dedicated to new partner acquisition and partner management.

Runae is based in the Bay Area with his partner and 15-month-old daughter, who recently discovered how to run (which is an exciting but also scary milestone!). When he’s not chasing after toddlers, you can find him hiking around Northern California or hosting Dungeons & Dragons games for friends and coworkers.

Joshua Krohn: Head of Design

Joshua (he/him) comes to Finch from Focus Lab—an agency focused on rebranding high-growth tech companies—where he most recently served as design director. In his seven years at Focus Lab, Joshua led brand strategy and visual identity projects for companies that have collectively gone on to raise billions of dollars. In his new role at Finch, Joshua will apply that experience to lead on all things design for our brand, including our product and website.

I’ve been branding and designing for software companies for over seven years, but it’s always been on the outside as a design agency partner,” said Joshua. “I’ve consistently been intrigued by what it takes to solve design challenges from the inside. At Finch, I get to do just that. Finch is also working on some deep problems in the employment sector, and helping solve those problems is exciting. Combine that with great founders and a world-class team, and it was an easy decision to join.

Joshua is based in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, where he balances his passion for design with running, chess, writing music, and playing any and all manners of games with his family.

Interested in joining Runae and Joshua at Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.

In this joint blog post with vehicle API provider, Smartcar, learn how information retrieval with APIs help increase revenue, quality of services, and productivity for commercial auto insurance providers.

Over the past 10 years, commercial auto underwriters have cited more than $22 billion in underwriting losses. To achieve long-term profitability, a 2020 report calls on providers to strengthen their collective focus on pricing, underwriting, and claims handling.

The industry is already responding.

Companies are taking advantage of stronger data ecosystems to withstand post-pandemic insurance prices, restrictive policies, and anxious drivers. Auto insurance rates have increased 3% in the United States from 2020 to 2021—but the rise in emerging telematics-based solutions has saved policyholders 4% on their insurance.

APIs can help commercial auto insurance providers improve underwriting models and customer experiences, whether that’s by streamlining broker communication or automating the retrieval of policyholder information.

In this blog post, learn how APIs can contribute to your goals and why the opportunity cost of implementation has never been lower.

How APIs give the commercial auto insurance providers a competitive advantage

For the commercial auto insurance industry, the potential advantages of API integrations—particularly integrations with vehicle data systems and HR and payroll systems—bolster customer satisfaction, retention, and profit margins. Here’s how:

Improve underwriting processes with real-time, granular data visibility

API integrations help you stream data straight from the source, ensuring your underwriting model is informed by the most complete and up-to-date information available. For vehicle integrations, that includes commonly misreported data attributes like odometer readings, VINs, and garaging locations, while HR and payroll system integrations enable you to collect your customers’ employee census records in seconds.

Reduce operating costs with automated workflows

In the United States and Europe, companies spend an average of 5 hours each week on the duplication of responsibilities—time that you could otherwise spend delivering higher quality services and products. Without automation, you lose significant time sorting, extracting, and analyzing large sets of data on drivers, vehicles, and driving records.

An API helps your business speed up claims management by seamlessly communicating data across claimants, carriers, and brokers. By automating what data is retrieved from vehicles and when, businesses can avoid repetitive manual processes, hefty spreadsheets, and missing information. In short, your operational productivity increases as you reduce in-house costs for data management and quality assurance.

Increase revenue with a better user experience

Amidst shifting workplace expectations and added economic anxiety, employers are more confident working with insurance carriers that are responsive, accurate, and easy to use. That’s how APIs give you a competitive edge—by allowing quick access to customer data for efficient broker communication and higher-quality risk assessment processes. The stream of rich, real-time data APIs helps your business evolve beyond just insurance. The data visibility that APIs enable can position your app as a forward-thinking partner that guides customers to make better decisions. All of this starts with the standardization of data retrieval processes and the elimination of cumbersome CSV file uploads, reducing friction for all parties involved.

Remove the need for aftermarket hardware devices

Tracking devices on policyholders’ vehicles can provide useful information on their driving habits—but they are expensive, vulnerable to tampering, and prone to loss, damage, and labor-intensive installation.  In contrast, an API integration can communicate directly with the embedded cellular modems built into most new vehicles. They’re easy to set up, don’t require any hardware or installation, and reduce the risk of fraud.

APIs power more access to vehicle data

Enrollment for telematics-based insurance saw significant growth during the pandemic and is used by the most popular auto insurers today. Nearly half of drivers who were given a telematics option for car insurance in 2021 opted into the program.

Connected car API platforms like Smartcar communicate directly with 4G and 5G telematics modems that are built into vehicles. In a few steps, Smartcar’s API can retrieve vehicle data such as odometer readings, location, VIN, and vehicle attributes.

For usage-based insurance (UBI) analytics provider True Mileage, odometer readings are automatically retrieved by clients at regular intervals. “I was completely awestruck when I learned that Smarcar enables insurers to connect to over 112 million vehicles,” said Ryan Morrison, founder and CEO at True Mileage.

Here’s how that works:

1. Customers link their car to your app: Vehicle owners are brought through Smartcar’s authorization flow, Smartcar Connect. The customer logs in with their car brand’s connected services account. In 2021, 66% of U.S. drivers were using connected car services. Check out Smartcar’s guides on how drivers can set up a connected services account if they don’t have one already.
2. Customers consent to sharing their car information: Smartcar lets vehicle owners review exactly what information will be shared with your insurance app. Vehicles are linked only after the customer clicks “Allow” on the screen.
3. The app requests vehicle data: After the customer has linked their vehicle, your app can begin collecting the necessary data to offer the best claims management processes and quotes.

With a single integration across multiple vehicle brands, you can improve data aggregation and extraction, present better quotes to customers, and expand risk management efforts with predictive analytics and pattern recognition.

APIs make it easy to retrieve employee information

Vehicle integrations are just the beginning. For commercial auto insurance providers, retrieving employee information is just as critical. Fortunately, Finch’s API makes it easy and intuitive. In just a few clicks, your customers can grant you access to their HR or payroll system, enabling a direct data stream and all of the insights that come with it.

The process is simple:

• Finch Connect (a secure front-end modal) prompts your customers to choose their payroll or HR system.
• Your customers authorize a set of permissions by entering their admin or API credentials into that system.
• The connection is established.

From there, you can begin pulling the data you need to process a customer’s policy and enroll employees in coverage. Finch’s API endpoints offer remarkable depth, including:

• Company data like your customers’ legal business name, EIN, departmental phone numbers, primary bank account number, and official address
• Directory data, as in a full roster of your customers’ employees (historic and current), their first and last names, personal and work email addresses, date of birth, and home address
• Employment data like job title (historic and current), supervisor, employment status (active or contractor, full-time or part-time), start date, and salary

In effect, Finch turns what was once a 30-day process, marked by clumsy document uploads and (seemingly) endless email back-and-forth, into a 30-second one—complete with richer, reliably accurate data.

To build or to buy?

There are many components to launching a software-driven auto insurance product for customers. You might consider custom integrations with vehicles and employer software, but the cost of building and maintaining all of those connections can impede product development and go-to-market plans.

Of course, reaping the benefits of providers like Smartcar and Finch requires outsourcing your API integrations, as opposed to building them in-house.

You may be asking yourself “do we build or do we buy?” While it’s natural to assume you can take on the work yourself (you do have a team of engineers, after all), there are a number of considerations you should weigh before taking that leap:

Team bandwidth and priorities

How much faster would you execute your roadmap if your team’s attention wasn’t split between your product and integrations? Integrations come with a heavy price tag when you consider the hours your team would spend building and maintaining connections. In fact, one Finch customer estimates it saved up to $100,000 by opting not to build in-house.

It takes a dedicated team to consistently monitor and troubleshoot APIs while providing technical support for both customers and internal teams building new features around the integration infrastructure. Partnering with an API platform can save your technical team weeks of engineering work that could otherwise be spent on core projects for customer acquisition and growth.

Agility to scale

Building one integration in-house might seem doable, but a single integration will only cover a fraction of your customer base. Your APIs need to scale as your audience does, but instead of getting easier, integrations only become more complex as you add to them. Disparate data sources have different data models, and the lack of standardization would force your developers to sort through heaps of unformatted data that your product does not need. When not done correctly, it can end up requiring a lot of manual intervention to make right.

A pre-built API ecosystem gives you the agility to expand existing offerings without the cost of developing new systems from scratch or upending existing ones. When smart charging app, Optiwatt, expanded its product compatibility to five new vehicle brands, they used Smartcar to ensure in-house developers could focus on upcoming new features instead.

Data privacy and security

Although APIs have become a common solution for businesses, these integrations are still vulnerable to cybersecurity risks if the right measures aren’t taken. Companies building their own API connections will need to stay on top of compliance processes and certifications at all times to build user confidence and meet industry standards. If you’re integrating your solution with vehicles, you will need to build out authentication, permissions, and token management systems to securely transfer mobility data with an API token. This increases the complexities of your integration development, especially when multiple OEMs don’t have their own tokens process in place.

Compounding maintenance costs

As a matter of course, integrations eventually break or malfunction due to system updates on your end or changes to the format of your data sources. Monitoring and troubleshooting these changes is a full-time job that will rob your team of valuable time and energy they could be spending on your core product. By having a dedicated team of experts to monitor and troubleshoot API errors, your business reduces the risk of technical backlogs and inconsistencies.

Not only does this help you manage your maintenance costs, but it also increases the reliability of your product and boosts customer confidence. If you don’t have the in-house resources to maintain your integrations, working with an API partner keeps your systems in order even when your business is scaling and your product is evolving.

Partner up to power forward

Join the growing fleet of providers leveraging APIs to improve processes, automate workflows, and build better user experiences. Contact Smartcar's sales team and get API keys from Finch today!

Developers using Finch now have access to our latest integration: UKG Pro. We cover 125 HR and payroll systems, enabling our customers to deliver best-in-class products and onboarding experiences to more users than ever before.

UKG: keeping employees connected, productive, and happy

When two of the largest HR technology companies, Kronos and Ultimate Software, officially merged in April 2020, they created not only a powerhouse human capital and workforce management provider, they created one of the largest cloud computing companies in the world.

The product of their unification, UKG (Ultimate Kronos Group), now boasts 12,000 employees and 50,000 clients across 150 countries. UKG’s comprehensive suite of products unifies HR, payroll, scheduling, operational analytics, case management, and talent management functions, including compensation, career development, and performance reviews—all with an eye toward facilitating meaningful interactions and driving superior business outcomes. Above all, UKG believes that when people feel valued, they’re empowered to tap into their unique talents, for the good of themselves, their company, and their communities.

Get access to the UKG Pro integration

If you’re already a Finch customer, then you automatically have access to the UKG Pro integration. If you’re not, it’s as easy as signing up for Finch. Click the Request Access button in the top right of our website to get started.

With Finch, you get access to the UKG integration plus 124 (and counting) other major North American payroll providers like QuickBooks and ADP RUN. And because our team owns all technical requirements for each integration and provides you with one universal API, you don’t need to worry about updates, maintenance, or issues.

Finch is proud to announce that we are SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and have released a security whitepaper detailing how we are keeping our customers’ data secure.

According to the AICPA (American Institute of CPAs), which sets the standards for data security and compliance, a SOC 2 report provides “detailed information and assurance” around factors related to user data, confidentiality, and privacy.

Finch has received a SOC 2 Type 2 report, which represents the most in-depth certification available. A Type 2 report involves collecting data over many months to confirm that a service organization is following proper procedures.

Security is paramount at Finch given that we provide access to confidential employee data, including Social Security numbers, addresses, birth dates, and bank account information.

Finch’s industry-leading tools employ various measures to safeguard sensitive data:

• We’re permission-based, meaning Finch puts employers in control and allows them to grant application access to specific employment records.
• We take data privacy seriously and do not share data with any unauthorized third parties.
• We grant full transparency to employers through Finch Connect.
  

With Finch, employers can be confident about how their employees’ data is being shared—and how it’s being protected. We’re committed to staying at the forefront of security, from additional certifications to tokenization and other cutting-edge practices.

To learn more about our comprehensive, multi-layer approach to security, please read our Security Whitepaper or use the Request Access button on our website to contact Finch today.

Developers using Finch now have access to our latest integration: Bob. With total coverage at 125 HR and payroll systems (and counting), Finch customers can expect more flexibility, more market opportunities, and better user onboarding experiences than ever before.

Bob: modernizing HR tech to help businesses–and people–thrive

When Israel David and Ronni Zehavi founded Hibob in 2015, they set out to transform the HR platform from a system of record into a system of intelligence and engagement–one that prioritizes user experience as much as functionality. Their goal: to meet the needs of fast-growing, global companies, cater to the expectations of younger generations of employees, and bring people together in meaningful ways.

Today, Bob (the name of their innovative platform) is as much a people-management system as it is an HR tool. With a focus on mid-sized, modern, multinational companies, the team behind Bob has built a distinctly welcoming and intuitive digital experience with the back-end power and connectivity to streamline core HR processes, improve performance, and serve as the single source of truth for the entire employee experience. All the while, Bob is agile enough to grow and scale with its customers (including Monday, Fiverr, Revolut, and Cazoo), who can run custom workflows by teams and regions to suit the disparate needs of their employees around the world.

How do I get access to the Bob integration?

Sign up for Finch by clicking the Request Access button in the top right of our website. (If you’re already a Finch customer, you automatically have access to the Bob integration.)  

With Finch, you get access to the Bob integration plus 125+ other major North American payroll providers like QuickBooks and ADP RUN. And because our team owns all technical requirements for each integration and provides you with one, universal API, you don’t have to worry about updates, maintenance, or issues.

Diana Liu may call California home, but for the foreseeable future, she’s criss-crossing the continent in an effort to take full advantage of Finch’s remote-first model. In a recent conversation, she told us about her extensive travel plans, her eclectic role at Finch, and the recent read she couldn’t put down.

Where did you grow up?

I was born and raised in the Bay Area and went to Berkeley for my undergrad degree. I’ve always been in communities where innovation, big ideas, and working really hard are encouraged. On top of that, my dad is an immigrant who started his own technology company in his 30s. I always thought that was really impressive of him and very admirable. I think that's what brought me to Finch–wanting to be part of this culture that I grew up in.

What did the path to Finch look like?

I wasn't technical; I didn't take a lot of coding classes in undergrad, but I still wanted to be a part of the tech world after I graduated. After college, I joined Deloitte’s HR strategy consulting arm. That's where I first realized how complex HR can get with fragmented data and a lot of manual processes. When Jeremy and Ansel reached out to me, I was very excited about the opportunity to change the employment data landscape.

What makes you a good fit for Finch and vice versa?

One thing that is really stressed is execution and ownership, especially when I started, because there were so few people to do the work that needed to be done. I think that's something that's in my nature: taking responsibility, managing projects, tracking action items, and reminding people to get stuff done.

What’s your role at Finch?

I work on functions that don't have a full-time person allotted to them and on ad-hoc projects. I also help with functions that the team thinks are critical–hiring, for example. I help with recruiting by conducting phone screenings and creating interviews. I address customer support tickets, create public-facing documentation for our customers, and manage billing and invoicing. I'm also working on marketing, security, and on streamlining some company-wide processes.

How would you like to see your role evolve?

What I would really like to do is continue to be a jack of all trades. By working in every function, I'll have a good idea of how they can effectively operate together. This also lets me create process documentation and playbooks for each role, so that when new hires join us, they'll have a baseline to iterate on.

What’s challenging about your job?

Most of my experience is in project management and product operations. I’m surprised to find myself working on customer support, hiring, security, and marketing projects. The learning curve is challenging, in a good way!

What excites you about your work?

Honestly, it's the customers. As I've come to understand our product more and see all of the manual processes it reduces, I'm really happy to see more customers connected and more integrations set up. I try to make sure that everything I do contributes to our mission of being there for our customers and helping as many as possible connect through Finch.

What makes Finch a great place to work?

At the end of the day, it's about the people. The whole team is very intelligent, very hardworking, but they're also very kind, which I think is hard to come by. Although I've liked most people I've worked with in the past, I do think that this group has something special.

How are you taking advantage of the fact that you get to work from home?

I plan to spend eight months out of the year traveling around North America and finding out what it's like to work and live in different places (depending on COVID). I’m super excited and I'm really thankful that Finch is a remote-first company, and it's not just because of the pandemic. We fundamentally believe that great people can come from anywhere and work from any city.

Where are you going, and where have you been?

I’m most looking forward to Hawaii, for sure, because Hawaii is Hawaii. I’ll also be in L.A. for two months, Puerto Rico for a few weeks, and Canada for a few weeks. I already spent a few months in New York, which was great. It was my first time visiting for more than a weekend, and I met up with one of my teammates several times.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

When I'm traveling, I like to do all the tourist-y things like exploring museums and eating good food. But when I'm at home, I like to do things that nurture my soul. I have treasured plants and paint with acrylics once in a while. I love to read, especially fiction or autobiographies by Asian-American authors, and I like to spend time with family and friends, for sure.

Have you read any great books lately?

There’s one called Not Yo’ Butterfly. It's by Nobuko Miyamoto, who was a professional dancer as well as an activist, and she’s pretty famous in the L.A. area. She writes about her life, what it was like being a minority in the ballet world, and her experience learning what it means to be an Asian-American activist.

What are you passionate about?

It's going to sound really cheesy, but I'm very passionate about spreading kindness in the world. Especially with COVID and everything that happened in the last two years, there's a lot of negativity, both in the news and on social media. I'm realizing, as I grow older, that life is hard for a lot of people and to just be kind to everyone I meet. I think that's also what drove me to go into HR-related work –because people spend so much of their time at work, they might as well enjoy it there.

Interested in joining Finch? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions.

For our first Spotlight, we checked in with John Skilbeck. Currently based in his hometown of Los Angeles, he shared his story of transitioning from accounting to engineering—and what excites him about working at Finch.

What do you do at Finch?

I'm a software engineer. I started at Finch about a year ago, and the experience has been a really positive one. I spend the majority of my time working on new and existing integrations.

Finch is a universal employment API that interacts with systems that are really old and clunky. So, that's where I come in. I build integrations against legacy software. I love problem-solving, so, to me, finding solutions feels like an itch that needs to be scratched. I love working here because there's always a new set of challenges. It’s really dynamic.

Why did you decide to become a software engineer?

I originally went to school for accounting. After graduation, I started working at a Big Four accounting firm. While there, I developed an interest in automating processes. It all started with some financial analysts showing me how they automate projections using Excel, and then more advanced stuff like SQLs, databases, and running queries. That’s when I thought, “Okay, cool. This is pretty interesting.”

I kept honing my skills, and eventually, I found myself working in the finance sector doing data engineering. From there, I made the move to software engineering.

That’s a big change. What was that transition like?

I loved accounting during school, but the actual practice at my job just never really clicked for me. It’s like, you have four years to guess what you want to do for the rest of your life, and if you get it wrong, it’s just so crushing. That’s what I experienced as an accountant. You learn something once, and then you’re on repeat for 40 years until you retire.

As a software engineer, you can't do that. You have to be constantly learning. I was always interested in that kind of thing. Finch is my second role as a sort of general software engineer, and it’s been really rewarding.

What brought you to Finch?

At my last company, we had five teams each working on their internal services API, and within my team, we had two or three APIs. I was responsible for one of them—the search API—and I got a lot of fulfillment out of the process.

When I first connected with Finch, they said "Yeah, we’re an API company, and you would get to do that all day." It was interesting to me from the start, and it really resonated with what I liked doing in my previous role. I'm so impressed with what the team has done in such a short amount of time. It feels like we’ve captured lightning in a bottle, to have such exciting demand for a product that just didn’t exist before. It feels like we’re creating a new market.

What’s your favorite part about working here?

We’re at an exciting stage of growth. This is the smallest organization I’ve joined. After spending time at larger companies, I knew I wanted to be at an early-stage startup. It’s refreshing to work with a group of folks where everyone is a core team member. I’m looking forward to the impact that we’re creating both internally and externally.

What do you do outside of work for fun?

Before COVID, my girlfriend and I were living in San Francisco in separate apartments. But we’ve been spending the pandemic together in Los Angeles, where I grew up.

We love to go hiking. My girlfriend has a dog named Mickey, and it’s been amazing hanging out with him. He’s so lovable—he’s like this furry thing the size of a football with a mouth and eyes, and it’s pretty cute. So, yeah, we like going on hikes with Mickey.

What’s something that you're proud of?

I’ve climbed Half Dome twice. It was really intense but also pretty cool. I’m also happy to have finally found a career that I truly enjoy.

If you could switch jobs with anyone at Finch for a month, who would it be?

During your first week at Finch, you sit through sales calls with Ansel, the COO and co-founder. I’ve discovered that there’s a lot of excitement around what we’re building. It’s indicative of how poorly employment systems are positioned for the current engineering age. So, I would temporarily switch with Ansel because I would have so much satisfaction on a daily basis seeing how our product is such a hit with our customers.

What are you looking forward to in the upcoming months?

We’re working on at least six new integrations for both large and small organizations. I’m also working on non-customer features to maintain code stability as we scale.

If you were to describe Finch in one word, what would it be?

Challenging. In the best possible way.

What motivates you?

I enjoy building products knowing that they’ll be used directly by external developers. Working as a data engineer kept my interactions limited to internal teams. Now, as a software engineer, there’s a level of satisfaction that comes from working with external teams and creating meaningful, impactful tools.

What’s something that you’ve learned during your time at Finch?

I’ve learned a lot about older technologies and how the web works. At my last company, we used five services, so you get to know them inside and out. At Finch, I’ve been exposed to all sorts of different systems and services because I have to integrate with what the client is using. So, the systems range from a couple of years old to 20. It’s basically the history of the web.

Finally, what’s the best advice you can give to someone who just started their career?

Don’t be intimidated by things breaking down. Early on, I’d get very intimidated by error messages. I’d spend days consumed by an error message. I’d text any engineering friends I had to see if they knew how to solve it and just stew. You need to roll up your sleeves and try to reason around what is happening. If it’s a library, dive into its source code or open issues. If it’s an integration, check the status code and/or response body, etc. Go deep. Try to figure out what’s going on, and keep at it.

Interested in joining the Finch team? We’re hiring! Check out our open positions here.

OnPay: a payroll business from the very start

When Jesse Burgess joined his family’s payroll business in 2007, he wanted to help the company’s payroll clerks be more efficient in serving their small business customers. Jesse streamlined the user experience, automated repetitive tasks, and ultimately realized he could bring the entire payroll process online. That’s when he founded OnPay.

Today, OnPay is a cloud-based and complete payroll solution that lets businesses run unlimited payrolls per month and create comprehensive employee information records. It’s popular with both small businesses and large organizations in North America, due to its great user experience, custom forms and fields, seamless user experience, automatic payroll tax calculation, and time tracking features. New users even get the first month free.

How do I get access to the OnPay integration?

Sign up for Finch by clicking the Request Access button in the top right of our website. (If you’re already a Finch customer, then you already have access to the OnPay integration.)

With Finch, you get access to the OnPay integration as well as 100+ other major employment providers (QuickBooks, ADP RUN, and more). You do not have to worry about integration updates, maintenance, or issues, as Finch’s team owns all technical requirements for each employment provider and provides you with one universal API.

Today we’re launching Finch and announcing our $3.5M seed financing led by General Catalyst with participation from Menlo Ventures, YCombinator, BoxGroup, Homebrew, Clocktower Ventures, and many incredible angels including the founders of Brex, Ramp, Mercury, Vouch, Digits, Human Interest, and executives from Plaid.

APIs are changing many industries and taking advantage of the paradigm shift from closed systems to open data access. My co-founder, Ansel, and I have witnessed this first-hand while working at our previous companies: I was an early engineer and led Product at Smartcar (a16z and NEA), an API for connected vehicles; Ansel was previously an investor at Bond and Kleiner, making investments in API companies like Plaid.

Ansel and I initially teamed up to build an embedded lending infrastructure platform, Extend, and allow vendors to easily offer lending products to their customers. This process involved everything from pulling data from multiple sources to creating A/B tests for credit models. We had several funding sources and partners lined up until COVID hit. Suddenly, customers dropped left and right. I guess no one wanted to launch a lending product during a global pandemic? 🤷

As luck would have it, during that time one of our partners approached us to talk about offering PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loans to the SMBs on their platform. We started reaching out to legacy and tech-enabled payroll and HR providers to discuss integrations and support the businesses that were in need. Most did not reply and those that did wanted us to present a PowerPoint proposal to different teams within the org. As a developer, we were looking for a Segment, Plaid, or Stripe-like developer experience, but we woefully discovered that such an API infrastructure did not exist.

The big picture

Payroll and HR systems are one of the last business systems without modern API infrastructure, yet they are critical to the operations of every business. These systems serve as the source of truth for employee records, organizational structure, and crucial fund flows. Many industries depend on accurate employee and organization data — from accounting to retirement planning to benefits administration.

Due to the importance and extensibility of these systems, developers expect a simple developer experience, but there are no self-serve APIs in the industry. Many developers have been forced to resort to CSV uploads, FTP, or be added as Third-Party Admins. Other companies have instead opted to spend millions in development costs, alongside years of business development efforts, to build one-off integrations. For example, the co-founder and CTO of Human Interest, a prominent 401(k) provider, said that building payroll and HR integration was one of the most time-consuming parts of their engineering effort, but it was essential to their success. This lack of connectivity in the industry is responsible for high administrative costs for employers, increased lock-in by legacy providers, and prohibitively high barriers for innovators.

We built Finch to change that.

Introducing Finch

Finch does the hard work of integrating with payroll and HR systems to expose a clean, unified API interface to developers. We build the infrastructure for many systems that touch employee records and facilitate data from employers to applications.

We are supporting a growing set of compelling use cases in both FinTech and HRTech, including — 401(k) providers, headcount planning, SMB lending, FP&A software, R&D tax credits, security compliance (SOC-II, etc.), employment verification, health benefits, and many more.

Finch powers innovations for employers and employees

An example of an application built on Finch is Mainstreet, which automates business tax credits for startups. At the beginning of the onboarding flow, Mainstreet prompts an employer to connect their payroll and HR system through Finch’s front-end module. They use Finch to pull past payroll runs, employee locations, employee titles, and more to provide the highest amount of tax savings to an employer. Finch has been the infrastructure powering over $65M in credits back to startups and SMBs.

Building the future of employment

This fundraising round is only the beginning of the journey and new use cases are yet to be discovered. As the nature of employment shifts over the coming years, Finch will empower innovators to build better products and experiences for a changing workforce, whether that is supporting the next wave of PPP loans or building a new employee benefit.

If this work excites you, we are hiring a diverse group of people to help us build, and if you are building something in the space, we would love to get in touch!

MainStreet is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that helps thousands of startups and SMBs discover and claim hundreds of local, state, and federal tax credit and incentive programs in minutes.

Every year, $100B is set aside by local, state, and federal representatives to help SMBs and startups turn their dreams into reality. But, claiming these credits is time-intensive, expensive, and often times, unpredictable — so billions sit unclaimed for years, waiting for founders to discover them.

MainStreet automatically qualifies companies for 200+ local, state, and federal tax programs and wins them back what they are owed in minutes — instead of the hundreds of hours, it would take an expert accountant to understand and apply to these programs.

• 💰 $65M+ in tax credits found and claimed, with an average of $51,040 saved per company
• 🕓 Two minutes — Customers can connect their payroll and HR systems and onboard to MainStreet in minutes using Finch
• 📊 Two days — The integration with Finch took two days, instead of the 8+ months, it would have taken to build the integrations internally.

Without Finch — Manual AE-Assisted Onboarding

Before Finch, MainStreet’s team of Account Executives (AE) onboarded every customer manually, working with them to add MainStreet as a third-party admin to their payroll platform. Then, their in-house operations team manually exported the relevant data and manually formatted the various fields. Painful for customers, and time-intensive for MainStreet: a lose-lose.

MainStreet needed a way to let SMBs quickly and securely share their historical payroll data without an AE’s help over the phone. Payroll data is essential to their business — without it, they wouldn’t be able to authenticate data or generate the required paperwork for each tax credit.

With Finch — Automated Self-Serve Onboarding

Now, with Finch, onboarding takes minutes. Customers authorize MainStreet to retrieve data from their payroll and HR systems in moments, and they’re good to go forever — MainStreet can now programmatically pull the data they need in real-time across multiple payroll and HR systems.

1. Finch Connect, Finch’s secure front-end module, prompts customers to choose their payroll provider.
2. Customers authenticate their payroll accounts and authorize a set of permissions by entering their admin credentials.
3. That’s it! In just a few seconds, MainStreet can start retrieving payroll data.

And… post-onboarding, Finch’s historical data access, and standardized schema let MainStreet streamline their data ingestion to their proprietary tax credit algorithms no matter what provider their clients use — Gusto, ADP, TriNet, Justworks, Finch supports it all.

Finch let us streamline MainStreet’s onboarding flow and gain access to crucial compensation data required to make complex tax credit calculations. Now we can move even faster and save more startups more money when they need it most.

Dan Lindquist, Cofounder & CPO

Integrating with Finch was simple. It took just a week vs. six months of engineering and business development efforts required for even a single payroll integration.

Engineering time is one of our most valuable resources. We worked closely with Finch’s engineers to ensure a smooth integration — they have been incredibly quick to add new providers while continuing to add functionality to make our lives easier. They’re an absolute delight.

Daniel Griffin, Cofounder & CTO

Strengthening partnership

Implementing Finch was just the beginning of a long-term relationship that’s already starting to pay dividends. Every time Finch supports a new payroll provider MainStreet automatically receives access to that integration without lifting a finger. Greater coverage means MainStreet can offer more SMBs access to the government credits they deserve.

Making our customers feel comfortable with our onboarding and product is our top priority — Finch’s secure, smooth, and professional product puts founders at ease during onboarding and gives us access to the surprisingly fragmented landscape of payroll providers we need.

Nick Abouzeid, Head of Marketing

Finch is always looking to partner with innovators like MainStreet, so if you’re building a product that can leverage payroll and HR data sign up to test out our API here.