Awardco and UKG launch partnership 10 months faster with Finch

In the world of employment technology, partnerships are paramount. Systems of record can keep their customers happy with connections to the products they already know and love, and third-party applications benefit from direct integrations that deliver data straight from their customers’ source of truth. 

From the start, leading employee rewards and recognition platform Awardco knew they’d need to integrate and partner with all of the HRIS and payroll systems their employers use—and UKG was at the top of the list. 

By leveraging Finch’s integrations, Awardco and UKG were able to validate their integrations and launch a partnership in about 2 months—over 80% faster than average. The partnership has opened up a ton of growth opportunities for Awardco, while allowing UKG to retain more customers and ARR.

Awardco: Real-time data is ‘table stakes’

Awardco’s technology aims to improve employee retention and save employers time and money by automating employee recognition, rewards, and incentives. In their eyes, the biggest challenge these employers face is time and resource constraints.

“HR professionals are bogged down with a lot of administrative tasks, so we want to take some of those off their plate and allow them to focus on more strategic things,” said Spencer Linsley, Executive Director of Partnerships at Awardco. “How can we empower HR folks to have a seat at the table and be viewed as not just a cost center within the organization, but a profit center?”

“How can we empower HR folks to have a seat at the table and be viewed as not just a cost center within the organization, but a profit center?”

Keeping employees happy and engaged requires keeping track of a lot of data, from birthdays to hire dates to title changes. But it’s critical for retention that employees feel valued—turnover is a huge and costly issue for organizations big and small. 

Garret Brent, Strategic Partnerships Manager at Awardco, explained that companies without a “true integration” between their HRIS and employee engagement solutions struggle to scale their rewards programs due to a lack of time and resources.

“If employee data isn’t being updated in real-time, then you're going to miss the low-hanging fruit of recognition moments that are really going to make the employee experience a lot better and a lot more meaningful within an organization,” Spencer said. “And if we aren't able to do those table-stakes actions for a customer, then it's going to again create an administrative burden and quite frankly, they're probably going to look at other providers outside of Awardco.”

Building integrations at scale

After spending more than a year building their first HRIS integration in-house, Awardco recognized how time- and resource-intensive the process truly was. So they started looking for a provider that could unlock the hundreds of connections they needed through a single integration. 

Spencer said Awardco viewed a unified API provider like Finch as a “force multiplier” for their Partnerships teams, and a necessary tool to onboard new customers with various HRIS systems quickly. But they also wanted a solution that would help unlock key partnerships that would allow the Sales team to grow Awardco’s customer base. 

“At the end of the day, being able to build a single integration, maintain a single integration, was something that was really, really important to us, Spencer said. “And having a high level of confidence that through Finch we’d be able to expedite the whole process of becoming a certified and validated UKG partner, that was and continues to be really important to us.”

"Having a high level of confidence that through Finch we’d be able to expedite the whole process of becoming a certified and validated UKG partner, that was and continues to be really important to us.”

UKG: Partnerships are a ‘competitive advantage’

UKG, a leading provider of HR, payroll, and workforce management solutions, partnered with Finch in 2023 to expand their partnership network and grow the UKG Marketplace. As the system of record for tens of thousands of employers, UKG leverages Finch to allow their partners to integrate to their suite of products quickly.

“For us that means more happy customers. It means higher retention, and it means that we get to keep ARR in the long run. And it gives us something to showcase when we’re selling to an organization that is really happy with Awardco—we can show them that implementing UKG won’t mess up the workflows they already have in place. In that sense, it’s extremely helpful,” said Miguel Tavera, Senior Technology Strategic Alliance Manager at UKG. 

“We're lowering the barrier to entry and making the process smoother, and I don't know how that would ever be a bad thing,” added Adam Derus, Senior Marketing Manager at UKG. “It’s just absolutely amazing to have that in our back pocket. It definitely feels like a competitive advantage.”

“We're lowering the barrier to entry and making the process smoother. ... It definitely feels like a competitive advantage.”

Finch expedites time to launch by over 80%

To become a partner on the UKG Marketplace, applications like Awardco need to undergo a thorough integration validation with UKG—a process that must be repeated for each of UKG’s products. Validating any one integration typically takes 3-6 months.

But Awardco had an ace up their sleeve: they use Finch to integrate with two UKG products — UKG Ready and UKG Pro — which meant the connections were already in place. Both integrations between Awardco and UKG were validated in 2 months — 10 months faster than the typical process. 

“The faster we can get you up and running the better, and to have two UKG products available right out of the gate in less than 2 months—it's got to be some kind of a record,” Adam said. 

Both Awardco and UKG view the speedy partnership as a win–win: 

• Awardco can onboard customers more quickly, access timely, accurate data that is used to automate employee recognition, and build upon the trust that UKG has earned with the employers they serve. 

• Meanwhile, UKG can “meet customers where they are and keep them happy with options for best-of-breed vendors,” as Miguel put it. 

“As UKG changes as an organization and we put more focus behind one product or another, having these strong partnerships with validated integrations is a huge help,” Miguel said. “And it allows our partners to get ahead of the curve and ahead of some of their competition in the marketplace, too.”