Connecting the Employment Ecosystem: Finch’s 2023 Recap

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.