Lauren Wan

At Finch, our mission is to make accessing employment data simple. In 2020, we released Finch Connect, an easy way for employers to connect their HRIS and payroll system to other apps. 

Over the past few months, we’ve been revamping our connection experience with a focus on increasing visibility for our customers and driving higher conversion rates among employers.

Today, we’re excited to announce this all-new connection experience, which includes secure sessions, authentication progress tracking, smart re-authentication, and a more intuitive connection management experience for all.

Secure sessions and authentication tracking

We're excited to introduce Finch Connect sessions, a powerful new feature designed to increase security and visibility in the authentication process. 

What’s new: You can now generate a unique and unchangeable Finch Connect URL for each employer, making the connection process more secure and allowing you to track authentication progress in the Dashboard.

Here’s how it works: Employers are invited to authenticate via a secure URL created just for them. Because these URLs are defined on the backend, they cannot be manipulated. Any Finch user within your organization can generate these secure links through our Dashboard.

Once the employer clicks the link and begins their session in Finch Connect, you’re able to track their progress through each of the four stages in the Dashboard.

Use the Authentication Progress tab for an overview of the employers’ progress. If there are any errors, Finch will provide more information so you can quickly resolve them. 

For a detailed timeline of events related to each session, you can navigate to the Session History tab.

Clear, actionable connection management

We’ve made changes to the Dashboard that make it easy to keep track of all of your connections across employers and their statuses.

What’s new: You can now easily view all your live, staged, and disconnected connections at a glance in the Dashboard under the Connections page.

Here’s how it works: Each connection will be labeled as Staged, Live, or Disconnected.

• Staged: The session is active, but a connection has not yet been established.
• Live: The employer has completed the Finch Connect workflow. If there are any errors or if re-auth is needed, it will be flagged under Connection Status in this view.  

• Disconnected: The connection is no longer live and the session is not active.

By clicking into any connection, you can also find more details about status, job history, access tokens, and more. You can learn more about Connection Status in this post.

You can now also download all your connections as a CSV file for deeper analysis or to share with other members of your team who don’t have Dashboard access.

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Smart re-authentication for employers

Over 40,000 employers have successfully shared access to their HRIS or payroll data through Finch. And while the need for re-authentication isn’t frequent, it is sometimes necessary to keep a connection active. 

We’re excited to introduce a simplified flow for these users that reduces the number of steps required to re-authenticate.

What’s new: There are now fewer steps required of employers who need to re-authenticate their connection.

Here’s how it works: When a connection requires re-authentication, it will be flagged in our API and Dashboard. Any Finch user can then generate a new link for the employer to re-authenticate. Rather than starting from the beginning of the Finch Connect process, the employer will be sent directly to the sign-in page for their provider, skipping any prior steps they’d already completed. All they need to do is sign in with their credentials, API key, or other authentication method to re-establish their connection. 

Just like the initial connection experience, you can monitor the stages of re-authentication in the Dashboard.

How to get started

We know how important changes like these are to your operations. As a unified integrations platform, it’s our job to take on the heavy lifting of offering the best connection experience for your customers so that you can focus on building the apps and services that empower employers and individuals.

These changes are now fully available through the Finch platform.  If you’re already a Finch customer, you will need to adopt connection and session IDs into your workflow to enable these new features. Instructions to adopt these fields are available in our Help Center. If you have any questions, reach out to us at developers@tryfinch.com.