The payroll landscape is constantly evolving, and staying on top of emerging challenges and budding trends is imperative, if not exactly easy.

Recently, we sat down with Keely Aguayo, a nine-year payroll veteran and Finch’s own payroll and benefits advisor, to talk about what’s new and next in the space. Having worked in payroll leadership positions at some of the most exciting and fast-growing companies, she offered tremendous insights on post-pandemic complexities, reporting shortcomings, and more that we didn’t want to keep to ourselves.

Diana:
Great to chat with you today. As a quick intro to the audience, my name is Diana Liu. I’m the first business hire at Finch and currently work on product and channel partnerships. I am incredibly excited to interview our resident payroll expert, Keely, about all things payroll today. Keely, would you mind giving a quick intro about yourself and your background, as well as what you're doing at Finch?

Keely:
Sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Keely. I've been working with venture-backed startups to manage payroll, benefits, and compliance for about nine years now, and I am currently advising Finch on all payroll and benefits needs in relation to their product.

Diana:
Awesome, thank you so much for that intro. So, you've had a chance to do payroll for some of the most tech-forward companies in HR tech. I'm really curious to know – what are some interesting trends that you're seeing? What are some of the biggest improvements that you've been noticing over time?

Keely:
I remember when I first started doing payroll, you had two options. You either went with basic ADP or you went with Paychex or QuickBooks payroll. There weren’t a ton of options out there, and it has been so interesting, almost mind boggling, to see how many new players have come into the market to do payroll and benefits, or one or the other, or HRIS. There are so many names out there that are doing this really well.

I would say the biggest trend that I'm seeing now is rather than just being a payroll provider, providers are now trying to be an all-in-one solution. They want to manage payroll, they want to manage benefits, they want to manage compliance, they want to be able to do all your state filings, help you with registrations, help you really hire these distributed workforces that are becoming so common these days in the tech industry. And it's been really great to see. Obviously, some companies are doing it better than others, but it's so great to know that there are so many options out there now for people to look at when they're looking for a new payroll benefits and compliance provider.

Diana:
I'm also really curious, do you see any high-level or major differences between providers that service primarily SMBs versus enterprise employers?

Keely:
No, I feel like the provider that works best for a company is very much company-specific. And what that means is, what is their priority? Is their priority a pretty HRIS system that can have all the functionality that they need? Is their priority, "Look, we have a really complex payroll system. We have three different payroll cycles. We have to figure this out. We need a payroll system where the payroll module needs to be super functional." Or maybe it's just, "I don't want to do anything manual, so I want to make sure you are currently integrated with all of my benefits providers, 401(k), health—that it's an all-in-one shop."

And so, it really depends on what the company is looking for, because it's very hard for these payroll providers to do all of it well, right? They're going to concentrate on one section of what they offer. Some of them have an amazing HRIS system, but their payroll's really manual, or it's lacking, or it's not as up to date as some of the other providers on the market. Whereas some others really concentrate on the payroll side of things. Maybe they started out as a payroll provider, and they moved into HRIS, but they weren't able to make their HRIS as functional and as great as their payroll. So, it's really company-specific.

Diana:
That makes a lot of sense. And I'm now thinking about my previous company, where, when the pandemic happened, people were allowed to start working remotely and they moved all over the place. I'm really curious to hear, what was your own experience managing payroll throughout the whole pandemic?

Keely:
It has definitely been a struggle for a lot of companies. I was remote prior to the pandemic and actually worked with a lot of remote companies, so it was a little bit easier for me to jump in. I knew the nuances. I knew how registrations were going to work, how filings were going to work. I knew that organizations would need to put in some kind of formal process for moves and whatnot. A lot of companies struggled in 2020. I worked with one company—they had 400 people in New York in 2020. At the end of 2020, they had 42 left.

Where did these 350 people go? Yes, some talked to their managers, some put in formal requests with HR, but some didn't say anything until they got their W-2 and were like, "Oh, so sorry, we actually moved across state lines. Can you correct us?" That’s a huge burden on not only the company but the payroll provider, and it's a huge cost, because to redo filings and regenerate forms and that kind of thing is both time consuming and very costly. So, it’s important to put a process around what that looks like but also, from a company standpoint, deciding if you’re going to allow it. Is this just something you are allowing for this year? Is this something you’re going to allow going forward? If you don't allow it, what does that look like?

So, it was a big struggle, and a lot of companies did not do well with it, while others did really well with it. It depended on how you approached it, how much you were on top of it, and what kind of information you provided to the employees. If you didn't tell them that they needed to communicate things, or you didn't give them a way to easily communicate things, it definitely caused a lot of struggles.

I would say the most I've ever seen companies struggle was early 2021, and it was really just fixing filings and W-2s and getting things straight and finding out where their workforce actually was. A big one was obviously if they changed countries, that's huge. “What are we going to do? How are we going to support this?” On the international side, there's a lot of players that have come onto the market since the pandemic started—new payroll providers that work in 120 countries and manage your entire workforce. And that is a byproduct of the pandemic and the issues it caused with US-based companies.

Diana:
I'm really curious to get your take on employers of record, or EORs. I feel like a few major players have popped up in the last few years, as you've mentioned.

Keely:
EORs are great, obviously, for companies that have a few employees in a particular country but are not at the point where they are able to open up a legal entity there. The EOR stands in as the legal employer in those cases and takes care of all the regulated aspects of employment like payroll, taxes, and benefits.

As with anything, some EORs are great, some are not so great. You can run into issues. EORs are very costly. At what point does it make sense to create your own entity? And I think that's where a lot of companies are struggling now. Maybe the EOR worked when they had less than five people, but now that they have 20 people in the country, does it make sense to open an entity? Does it make sense to offer benefits? What would that look like, and what would be the cost? So, I think EORs are great for what they do, but having 20 or 30 EORs can be a little too much for a company to manage.

Diana:
I'm wondering, even with all of these changes, what do you think are some current pain points that still exist today?

Keely:
I would say the biggest pain point I see in payroll systems is reporting. I find most payroll systems still lack in their quality of reports, the ability to customize reports, and the ability to have a bank or general report storage that encompasses everything an organization can need.

The way most payroll providers fix this is they do custom reporting, but that can get really confusing and it can be really hard to get the information you need. And then, when auditors come in, insurance providers come in, 401(k) providers come in—maybe you're acquiring a company or you're raising your next round of funding—it can be really difficult to give everyone all the information they ask for.

I would say another thing that comes into play a lot is integrations. My prior company had about a thousand employees. Our payroll system did not integrate with our benefits provider, and that required manual uploads on both ends every month to make changes.

That can be a lot of work for companies but it's one of those things that's like, "Who do we want to partner with? We're not going to integrate with everyone." Maybe you like your benefits and don't want to rock the boat with your employees, but you need a new payroll system and have to decide if you can take on the manual work. And that's where you're seeing a lot of payroll teams within an organization getting very granular—where it's not just enough to have a payroll manager anymore. Now you need the payroll specialist, you need the payroll coordinator, you might even need a director of payroll. And a lot of it has to do with payroll systems not being able to be this true source that they claim to be.

Diana:
Sounds like painful manual work to have to update the deductions from payroll to 401(k) every month. Integrations are exactly what Finch provides and this is the exact problem that we're trying to solve. I'm wondering if that's potentially why you decided to start working and advising at Finch.

Keely:
I really liked what Finch was doing, and in my first conversation with Ansel I thought, “Why aren't more companies using this backend integration to be able to pull the data that they need?" That's really what attracted me to Finch. I like that it's still like a scrappy startup. They're building something that others are not. They're really trying to build a solution that works with payroll providers and benefits providers. It's not just a one-bucket thing. And honestly, the team's great. I am so happy to be here.

Diana:
This might be a bit of a spicy question, but I'm wondering, what are some product improvement opportunities or suggestions that you have for Finch or the Finch product?

Keely:
It's very hard to get in the mind of these benefits and payroll providers and be able to support every single deduction and contribution they have. Another byproduct of the pandemic is that you are seeing so many more fringe benefits offered by companies—that is, all of the perks, benefits, and stipends that, in addition to salary, add up to someone’s total compensation package. Things like wellness benefits and employers paying cell phone bills and offering work-from-home internet stipends are all examples of fringe benefits. Those have been gaining traction over the years, but since the pandemic, it has gotten crazy. These things are expected by employees, and every payroll system and HRIS system does it differently. So, some may word it this way, some may word it that way, some may limit how many you can have. So, it's very hard for any one product to be able to pull every subset of data without being the engineer and the product team on the other side of the table.

On that note, I've had some really great client calls since I've been at Finch, and I do see the product going in that way, and I love the idea that we are able to customize it to an extent. I had a recent client call where they had 180 different deduction codes, and I was like, "There's no way we can pull that many data points." And we did an amazing, eye-opening mapping exercise where it was like, "Yes, the Finch product can pull these data points. This is just what it's going to look like. And then these are the ones we can't do, but let's ask questions and see how we can make it work for you." So, I love that the product's still at that phase where we can really customize it and that we're moving that way. But there are also limitations, as in all systems.

Diana:
That is great feedback for our product. Thank you for that. I know the product operations team, which you're part of, has been working really hard at researching how to make our product more robust. I would love to know, what are some upcoming projects that you're really excited to work on here at Finch?

Keely:
I'm actually going into these payroll and benefit systems, researching the capabilities there, and then going back to the product team and telling them, "Okay, this is what it looks like in this system. This is what we would need to do on the Finch side to be able to pull the data that XYZ company is asking for." So, that's really exciting.

We're also building out playbooks where we are going to have a specific set of instructions and all of these cool videos for each provider that we work with that we will eventually be able to use in our sales pitches. Like, "Hey, we work with another client that uses this system,, and this is what we did for them, and this is the data we can pull.” I'm really excited about that and building out those products that will help Finch grow.

Diana:
That sounds like some really impactful and detailed work. That's amazing to hear. It's been really great chatting with and learning from you, and I deeply appreciate the time.

Keely:
Thank you for having me, Diana.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

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This month’s updates include a partnership with exciting implications, an alternative auth protocol, and a host of new supported data points.

HiBob partnership and upgraded integration

In November, we were thrilled to announce our deeper partnership with HiBob. With that partnership, our HiBob integration has gotten a facelift.

Now, employers who want to connect their HiBob account to a third-party can authenticate directly through Finch Connect to generate a long-lasting API token that queries the HiBob API without the user exiting our front-end modal. Alternatively, employers using SSO will be able to walk through a quick set of instructions that lets them directly generate the API token from within the HiBob dashboard. This will then be shared with Finch, completing the authentication process.

Authenticating via Paylocity API

The more than 33,000 U.S. employers who use Paylocity to run their payroll and HR functions are the new beneficiaries of an exciting product feature: alternative auth via API token.

In other words, employers looking to link their Paylocity account to another application will have the option to do so directly with API credentials, for an ultra secure and reliable connection.

The new option is presented to employers who select Paylocity as their provider in our front-end modal as an alternative to the default Finch Connect flow. Once they follow the process outlined by Paylocity, employers will receive a set of API keys which can then be securely shared via Finch Connect.

Expanded field support

• Employees’ legal names are not always how they refer to themselves, and, in some cases, can even be in conflict with their identity. New support for preferred_name in our Paychex API integration allows applications using Finch to distinguish the two.
• In other news, our Justworks integration now covers gender, an essential datapoint for workplace equity and compensation strategy use cases, to name a few.
• Added support for department and employment.location for our assisted Paytime integration.

That's a wrap for November! If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for free access to put our latest features to work for you.

Since inception, Finch has been a major proponent of employer choice, giving them the ability to securely and compliantly share their data with trusted third parties. Not only should employers be able to choose who they share data with and what data they share, but also how they do so.  

Today, we are extending employer choice to the authentication process for Paylocity customers. Paylocity has over 33,300 employers using their platform across the US leveraging a full suite of HR products from payroll to benefits management. Similar to the TriNet integration update included in our September product post, Paylocity users will now be able to choose to authenticate access via API credentials for a secure, reliable syncing experience. Check out our compatibility docs to confirm which datapoints are accessible via this new authentication method.

How to Connect

Employers who select Paylocity as their provider will see a new authentication option offered as an alternative to default Finch Connect flow. Once they follow the process outlined by Paylocity, employers will receive a set of API keys from Paylocity, which can then be securely shared via Finch Connect.

Want to get your hands on this new feature? Click here to sign up for free and test out Finch's expanded Paylocity auth flow in your application.

This month’s updates include the beta launch of our new ATS API, an updated authorization workflow for our latest HRIS partner, and additional data field coverage for some of our most popular supported systems.

Announcing our first ATS integration

In response to growing customer demand, we’ve officially launched the Finch applicant tracking system (ATS) API, and our first ATS integration, Lever, is live!

Because applicant tracking systems house crucial insights into an organization’s recruiting pipeline, seamless ATS data connectivity is essential to B2B applications that service the candidate lifecycle. To unlock a range of high-value use cases in product categories like candidate sourcing, compensation management, and DEI, our ATS API supports four data models: candidate, applications, jobs, and offers.

Reach out to get early access!

BambooHR OpenID Connect

As part of our strategic partnership with BambooHR, Finch customers can now leverage BambooHR’s OpenID Connect to establish data connections with the fast-growing HRIS.

OpenID Connect is a reliable authorization method that acts as a simple identity layer on top of the OAuth 2.0 protocol. By working through BambooHR’s OpenID Connect flow, we’re making it even more seamless and intuitive for your users to permission a data sync between your application and BambooHR.

Expanded field support

Deduction Types

Building on the headway we made in August, Finch now proudly supports Section 125 medical, dental, and vision deduction typing for ADP Run, PrismHR, and UKG Pro. This level of granularity fuels innovative customer use cases related to deduction management, tax credit calculations, and more. You can find them displayed in the employee_deductions[].type field on our /pay-statements endpoint.

Employer Benefits Contributions

For Trinet and Zenefits, you can now view employers’ benefit contributions—like 401(k) matches—in the pay-statements field, which provides essential visibility for retirement benefits providers.

Gender

The gender field is now supported in Rippling, ensuring that developers building products that analyze pay disparities and DEI issues have crucial data access for a significant segment of their customer base.

Class Code

In continued support of workers’ compensation insurance use cases, the class_code field  is now available through the employment endpoint in Trinet—adding to the list of systems we previously rolled out support for in September.

This field identifies the type of work an employee performs, enabling insurance companies to more accurately assess risk and calculate premiums for employers. Please note that 14 states operate with a class code system independent of the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) standard. Cross-referencing each employee’s work location with the class_code field is important to properly interpret this datapoint for insurance products.

That's all for October! 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.

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.

Since our inception, Finch has been committed to building the infrastructure to enable tech innovators to leverage employment data and build next-generation solutions for employers. Accomplishing this at scale means collaborating with like-minded disruptors. That’s why we’re excited to announce our latest strategic partnership with HiBob.

HiBob: Streamlining core HR functionality for modern businesses

HiBob is on a mission to transform how organizations operate in the modern world of work with its HR platform ‘Bob’.  Leading the way for the future workplace, Bob offers resilient, agile technology that wraps all the complexities of HR processes into a game changing, user-friendly tool that touches every employee across the business.

HiBob innovates through continuous learning loops to produce seismic cultural shifts for companies with dynamic, distributed workforces. From out-of-the-box onboarding, workflows, performance and compensation management to people analytics and more—Bob gives teams everything they need to operate efficiently. But that’s not all. Bob also provides essential engagement features that drive communication, inclusion, and belonging—inspiring a remarkable experience for every employee.

We’re very excited to partner with Finch and drive data accessibility for the high-growth companies that are using HiBob. Today’s digital workplaces require integrated applications. When systems combine, they make it easier for employees to collaborate, share information, and get great work done. The right tech can really make or break a global culture from both a business and a people perspective. We’re thrilled to offer our customers a seamless connection to the HR tech applications of their choice through the Finch integration.

Breanne Murphy, Global Head of Partner Marketing at HiBob

What our partnership means for the future

The employment data ecosystem is incredibly fragmented – the average small business has 18 different applications that may or may not work together in a seamless fashion. To perform at the speed of modern business and create the best employee experiences possible, employers need leading-edge technology that addresses their unique pain points. That means being able to push and pull data between individual systems to automate inefficient manual processes like onboarding, PTO approval, and setting IT permissions. But for organizations trying to scale internationally, this requires investing in multiple, siloed HR applications or an all-in-one platform that may be missing functionality or exclude leading applications in a product category.

As one of the top HRIS platforms in Europe and North America, HiBob recognizes the importance of connectivity when it comes to employment data for both customers and third-party developers. HiBob’s modern HR platform provides a flexible infrastructure that allows organizations to build seamless employee experiences around their biggest pain points. By leveraging Finch’s universal API, HiBob can extend that flexibility to developers around the world.

Through the partnership, Finch and HiBob will be able to better support developers and employers while disrupting the HR tech space. By enabling secure access to employment data on behalf of employers, we’re ensuring interoperability between B2B solutions—opening the door to greater innovation, fueling the growth of the HiBob integration marketplace, and building a future-ready workforce.

How the integration works

On a technical level, our integration allows employers to securely share their HiBob data with their favorite third-party applications. Employer admins authenticate directly through Finch Connect to generate a long-lasting API token that queries the HiBob API while keeping the admin within Finch’s front-end modal. Alternatively, employer admins using SSO will be walked through a quick set of instructions that lets them directly generate the API token from within the HiBob dashboard. This will then be shared with Finch, completing the authentication process.

Once the employer admin has been fully authenticated, they’ll automatically connect real-time, org-wide employment data from HiBob with the desired third-party application and begin supporting robust, integrated HR experiences—putting HiBob customers at the forefront of a growing market.

The companies that use HiBob today are typically tech-forward and highly efficient operations. They don’t have time to spend on manual processes. They want and expect integrated experiences, in addition to flexibility in how those experiences are built and maintained across apps. HiBob and Finch are enabling employer choice and supporting developers and HiBob customers by powering the automated solutions they are looking for.

Runae Lee, Head of Partnerships at Finch

Support your customers using HiBob and sign up to get your free sandbox API keys today.

At Finch, we believe in a connected future where employers can seamlessly synchronize their data across applications and providers can enable the next wave of HR and fintech innovation.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re one step closer to achieving that goal through our strategic partnership with BambooHR.

BambooHR: One-stop shopping for employers

BambooHR helps employers enter, track, view, and manage HR and business data in one centralized system, freeing employers to focus on what matters most to a growing organization – people.

We're dedicated to partnering with top rated solutions that save our customers time, streamline their management process, and set them free to do great work. We love that Finch helps us delight customers by allowing their data to sync quickly and effortlessly across applications.

Natalie Bigney, Marketplace Manager at BambooHR

What our partnership means for the future

The collaboration between Finch and BambooHR exemplifies our shared commitment to empowering innovators. Together, we’re working together to ensure employers can share employment data securely with third-party applications—and changing the status quo in the process.

At issue is the stifling lack of data connectivity that has long held back the employment data ecosystem. Without reliable programmatic integrations, employers have had to rely on highly manual processes like flat-file sharing to access their own data. Despite the challenges and cost of manual work, employers invest thousands of hours to pull this data and drive important business processes, from headcount planning to expense management and practically everything in between.

Finch first took on the challenge of solving this issue when we built a universal API to integrate with HR information systems and payroll providers. We now provide mission-critical infrastructure for applications across B2B fintech, benefits, HR, and enterprise verticals.

Customers are growing to expect that their applications will work together out of the box. BambooHR is partnering with Finch to support employer choice and ensure broad compatibility with leading and emerging technologies in this space. In short, Finch and BambooHR are working to ensure interoperability between platforms to enable innovation and exceptional efficiencies fueled by employment data.

How the integration works

Our partnership makes accessing the employee data in BambooHR a seamless process. Employer administrators simply permission the data sync through Finch Connect by way of BambooHR’s OpenID Connect flow—a streamlined, reliable method of authorization that builds on the OAuth framework.

To log in, admins enter their BambooHR subdomain into Finch Connect, which will redirect them to BambooHR, where they can then authenticate using either single sign-on or their BambooHR account credentials. Once complete, the authorized third-party provider has immediate, streaming access to the real-time, organization-wide employee census data stored and managed by BambooHR.

It’s that simple.

By partnering with BambooHR, we’re solidifying our commitment to build a more connected ecosystem centered around employer choice. Not all SMBs are alike and BambooHR understands this. Through this integration, we’re enabling tens of thousands of employers to connect with the third-party applications they trust to help them run their organizations.

Ansel Parikh, co-founder of Finch

Want to see our partnership in action? Sign up to get your free sandbox API keys here and check out our listing on the BambooHR Marketplace.

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Problem: Corporate Merch knew integrating with HR and payroll systems was mission-critical, but they needed to get to market quickly while also ensuring their customer base was fully covered. Before the company could commit to partnering with Finch, they needed us to add two key integrations to our 180+ list of supported systems—fast.

Solution: With a proven process in place to build integrations quickly, we successfully added both providers within weeks, and Corporate Merch was able to go live with automated integrations as large customers started onboarding.

Swag-as-a-service Platform

Corporate Merch is a new breed of swag company. Not only do they create quality branded gift items for their customers to send to employees, clients, and partners, Corporate Merch also provides state-of-the-art storage and packages and ships swag item-by-item to intended recipients. The linchpin of their operation is a proprietary software system that lets customers easily view, manage—and automate—their inventory, orders, and shipments.

Integrations as a path to differentiation

Early on, it became clear to Corporate Merch that the employee swag space, in particular, needed disrupting. The reason? People operations professionals typically have to use antiquated and ad hoc solutions like spreadsheets and Google Forms to collect and track employee data and manually distribute merchandise.

Corporate Merch knew that automating these tasks would be a gamechanger—and that the key to automation would be integrating with the HR and payroll systems customers use every day to house employee data. The problem was, building all of the integrations they required to cover their customer base would take two years and a lot of patience. For Corporate Merch, that was a non-starter.

A ready and responsive partner

Corporate Merch needed a partner that could help them get integrated quickly, so they could go live with automations just as fast. Finch emerged at the top of the pack for its employment system expertise, ease of use, overall support, and technical responsiveness.

Working with the Finch team has been a breeze, and they know this space through and through—that's why we chose them.

Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President

But the partnership came with a stipulation: Finch first had to integrate with two new SMB and enterprise systems essential to Corporate Merch’s customers that were missing from Finch’s coverage network.

With a proven, proprietary system for building integrations in place, our development team was able to successfully build and test the both complex integrations in a matter of weeks, enabling Corporate Merch to get unblocked with larger customer implementations.

Finch held our hand through the whole process. They showed us the endpoints that we would want to focus on and what to stay away from. They answered all of our questions. We wouldn't have gone live so quickly if it wasn't for their help and their concern about us building it the right way.

Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President

What’s more, the support didn’t stop at implementation. Spirgel says he values the guidance Finch continues to offer the Corporate Merch team as they plot out their product roadmap, including how responsive Finch is to their questions over Slack.

Automating celebration

The effect on Corporate Merch’s user experience has been remarkable. Now, customers have the option to securely connect their HR or payroll system at onboarding, all in a matter of moments:

1. Customers select their HR or payroll platform from the options provided.
2. They sync their account and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch's secure, compliant, and white-labeled Connect modal.

This connection allows customers to set up triggers that automate the swag process, like sending out gifts for employees’ birthdays or work anniversaries or distributing onboarding kits when new hires join the team. Most importantly, the connection is continuous, so that as employees come and go from customers’ organizations, Corporate Merch’s system is kept up to date.

As for coverage, Corporate Merch hasn’t run into a customer yet who hasn’t been able to integrate via Finch.

Now, we are confident that when we walk into a demo meeting, the integration that a prospective client needs is already built. I’d say 95% of our clients’ HR and payroll systems are covered through Finch.

Daniel Spirgel, Corporate Merch's President

At Finch, we're committed to enabling innovative platforms like Corporate Merch create the best experience for their customers. If you’re interested in getting hands-on with org-wide employment data, sign up for a free Finch developer account today!

This month's updates include further expansion of coverage with two additional API integrations, greater availability of a key field for insurance providers, and a new way to connect with TriNet customers. Check out what’s new!

Broader North American coverage with two new integrations

Wave

Wave offers payroll as part of an all-in-one suite of financial products that serve over 2 million SMBs across the US and Canada. Acquired by H&R Block in 2019, the company offers a set of free services including invoicing, accounting, and banking, and adds additional paid services such as payroll, payments, and bookkeeping. We're excited to support Wave and allow developers to connect with hundreds of thousands of their payroll clients.

Quickbooks Canada

While we have compatibility with Quickbooks Payroll in the US we've now added support for Quickbooks Payroll as part of our broader international expansion efforts. Now developers can connect directly all 1.4 million Quickbooks Payroll customers across North America.

Expanded support for worker's compensation fields

We continue to roll out new fields for essential use cases and have made the worker's comp class_code field available in both Quickbooks and Paylocity alongside Gusto, ADP RUN, and others.

This field within the employment endpoint exposes the specific 3-4 digit code that identifies the types of work an employee performs so that insurance companies can estimate risk and calculate accurate premiums for employers.

While many of them will follow the National Council on Compensation Insurance (NCCI) code system, 14 states operate with independent class code systems. Cross-referencing the work location state for each employee with the class_code field is important to properly interpret this datapoint for your insurance product.

Alternative auth option with Trinet API token

With over 23,000 employers supported in the US, TriNet is one of our longest-standing and most popular integrations, and we’ve given it a fresh new update! Our TriNet integration now supports the option to connect via TriNet’s API directly. This new integration option is both a smoother and more secure experience, providing significant latency and reliability improvements to the connection.

How to Connect

Employers who select TriNet as their provider will see a new authentication page displayed by default in Finch Connect. Once they follow the process outlined by TriNet, employers will receive a set of API keys from TriNet, which can then be securely shared via Finch Connect.

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.

Today we’re announcing support for connecting Canadian versions of Quickbooks Online via Finch Connect. This integration expands our Canadian 🇨🇦 coverage alongside Wave!  Quickbooks joins Personio and Humaans integrations - both recently launched European-focused HRIS - that represent our continued efforts to support international systems.

How do I get access to the Quickbooks Canada integration?

Access to Quickbooks Canada is available today via Finch Connect. Canadian accounts connect seamlessly; employers can connect using the existing Quickbooks integration page in Finch Connect. Finch will automatically detect whether the account being connected is Canadian and handle any integration differences.

If you’re not yet a customer and are interested in gaining access to Finch, sign up for a free sandbox account, and get your API keys today.

With our universal API, you’ll gain access to 180+ HRIS and payroll integrations and counting, from ADP RUN to Zenefits. 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.

Problem: To be the best-in-class employee rewards platform customers want and expect, PerkUp needed seamless, reliable access to employee data that could power time-saving automation.

Solution: With Finch, PerkUp was able get up and running with HRIS integrations in a sprint and offer their customers a seamless syncing experience. After using Finch for over a year, PerkUp was able to lower support costs, create stickier customer relationships, and expand their TAM, all without having to dedicate resources to maintaining the Finch integration.

Rewarding and recognizing employees. globally

PerkUp helps businesses drive employee engagement by making it easy for them to manage and scale their employee rewards program. Through PerkUp’s comprehensive but simple-to-use platform, customers can send incredible, curated gifts to employees worldwide.

The data conundrum

PerkUp’s primary users are busy HR and people operations professionals who are increasingly protective of their time. PerkUp knew that to be a vital solution, they would need to deliver on ease of use and reliability through automation.

But automating employee gift-giving requires employee data—fields like name, start date, birthday, location, and manager. That gave PerkUp a choice: build a sophisticated CSV uploader or find an integration solution that connects directly to customers’ HR information systems (HRIS).

PerkUp knew that a CSV uploader would not only be a heavy lift, it would also only transfer static data that would need to be regularly refreshed by the platform’s users—a friction PerkUp wanted to avoid.

Next, PerkUp considered an iPaaS provider, but ultimately didn’t want to take on the burden of managing the workflows in-house. They needed an integration solution that would enhance the performance of their product without taxing their internal resources.

That’s when PerkUp turned to Finch.

Streamlining the onboarding experience

In less than a single engineering sprint, PerkUp was up and running with Finch, creating a truly best-in-class data syncing experience.

The mechanism by which Finch works is easy, secure, and intuitive. PerkUp customers simply connect their HRIS at onboarding in two steps:

1. They select their HRIS from the options provided.
2. They sync their account and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch’s white-labeled Connect modal.

Instantly, PerkUp has data access, and customers can create the rules they need to automate their gift-giving workflows—like sending employees rewards on their birthday or company swag on their first day on the job.

What’s more, the data connection is continuous and refreshes every 24 hours, ensuring PerkUp is always working from the most up-to-date employee information. Compared to flat-file transfers and manual data syncs, the efficiencies are enormous.

Finch saves our customers time and headaches, which means they require less customer support from us. We've had 400-person companies connect their system in minutes. When that happens, it's amazing.

Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO

Built to set and forget

Finch is designed to create a seamless "set-it-and-forget-it" experience for both PerkUp's engineers and customers.

In the year that PerkUp has been using Finch the engineering team was able to shift virtually all resources away from managing the Finch integration, only having to make updates for new data fields. Moreover, PerkUp's customers were able to establish long-lived connections to their HRIS without having to check if data was stale, creating a smooth, consistent experience.

Finch is like the Plaid of HRIS. We love that they’re going deeper, both in terms of the providers they’re adding and the data they’re retrieving. That's the type of partner that we want.

Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO

Driving lasting business impact

Finch’s ever-growing coverage of the long-tail also expands PerkUp’s target addressable market and helps the sales team make inroads with innovative employers using next-generation HRIS.

When Finch released the HiBob integration, for instance, PerkUp was able to go back to leads who had been asking for it. PerkUp says that made their team look great to prospective customers—like they had done the work to cater to their request—when, really, it was their Finch partnership that made it possible.

Beyond sales, Finch also supports one of the platform’s primary revenue streams. For PerkUp, the business case is clear:

Finch makes our product much stickier. As our customers grow, Finch reduces the admin burden for them, embeds us more deeply in their operations, and generates additional per-employee-per-month fees for us. It supports our business on multiple levels.

Thomas Mirmotahari, PerkUp's Co-Founder & CEO

In fact, there are a surprising range of business outcomes that Finch's integrations can impact. Learn more about the eight key business KPIs that we can improve at your company here.

At Finch, we’ve made it our mission to enable innovative platforms like PerkUp create the best experience for their customers. If you’re interested in getting hands-on with employment data, sign up for a free Finch developer account today!

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As developers ourselves, we know that while APIs are a great first step to increasing business efficiency, when it comes to implementation, SDKs create a superior experience.

We recognized this early on at Finch, which is why we focused on developing our React SDK for Finch Connect. This SDK offers an easier alternative for embedding Connect into applications versus using the Finch API directly. However, it also constrained developers to using React if they wanted to embed our product.

For this reason, we’ve gone back to the basics and developed a vanilla Javascript SDK for Finch Connect. This framework-agnostic SDK offers more flexibility when embedding Finch Connect into your frontend applications. Any web app running Javascript can now take advantage of the improved developer experience that SDKs offer.

Using the SDK

To embed Connect via our JS SDK, simply load the SDK via a script tag and add some simple initialization code to your application:

<script src="https://prod-cdn.tryfinch.com/v1/connect.js"></script>

The returned FinchConnect object exposes open, close, and destroy lifecycle methods, which you can utilize to seamlessly get Connect up and running in your application.

Read our docs to learn more about our JS SDK and view the open source repository here!

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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Reduced latency with data syncs

Finch now syncs data with providers on a 24 hour cadence, and Finch API requests now return data from the most recent sync. This will result in major improvements to response latency, as well as a more smooth and consistent experience using Finch — any provider-specific issues related to their own infrastructure will be smoothed over by our most recent sync data. In the future, we’ll be adding even more rich functionality to our data syncs, including faster refresh times and the ability to force a data sync on-demand.

Embed Finch Connect with the new Javascript SDK

In addition to our ReactJS SDK, Finch now offers a vanilla Javascript SDK for embedding Finch Connect into your application. Simply load the SDK via a script tag and add some simple initialization code to your application to embed connect.

Developers are no longer limited by choosing React to embed Connect with our supported SDKs. Any web app running Javascript can now take advantage of this superior developer experience.

More granular deduction types for 3 more providers

From calculating tax credits to identifying when deductions have been applied, many customer use cases rely on being able to consistently discern benefit deduction types in employee pay statements. We have now added support for Section 125 Medical deduction typing in Paychex Flex, ADP Workforce Now, and Rippling. You can see these s125_medical types showing in the form employee_deductions[].type field on Finch’s /pay-statements endpoint. More providers to follow soon!

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.

If you’re a B2B application selling to employers—an employee training platform or employee engagement platform, for instance—then you know that creating additional value for your customers is critical to building a stickier product and, ultimately, ensuring your success. One way to create this value is to offer your customers deeper insights into their employee lifecycle by tracking the metrics customers care most about.

In this post, we’ve collaborated with ChartHop to dive into three employee lifecycle KPIs you can derive from employment data housed in your customers’ HRIS and payroll systems. Read how they are transforming their customers’ employee lifecycles here.

By surfacing similar metrics for your customers, you can help them create a better employment experience.

Let’s get started!

1. Internal mobility rate

As employees move up the ranks or across positions, the path they take can be tracked. Known as career mobility, this movement encompasses both the standard promotional structure (i.e., when employees earn greater responsibility and more senior titles) as well as lateral movement between teams and departments. So, why is this data important?

Tracking employee movement across positions and departments allows you to provide your customers with a detailed summary of their organization’s propensity to create growth and development opportunities for their employees. They can then use this data to give new hires a better understanding of the long-term career paths available to them from their first-day onwards—which can aid in cultivating a workplace culture that’s conducive to employee retention.

This metric also allows you to provide your customers with more granular insights into the flow of employees between departments. By divvying up the data by team, you can weigh how certain sectors of the organization are performing in regard to developing growth opportunities against others and reveal areas in need of improvement.

How to calculate internal mobility

Calculating internal mobility is simple: take the total number of internal movements and divide it by the average number of employees during the same time period. Once you have this number, multiply it by 100 to turn it into a percentage.

Pulling internal mobility rate from Finch

Because many systems don’t show historical organizational structure changes, you will need to record this data over time across the organization before you can calculate internal mobility rate. Here’s how:

1. Call the Directory endpoint to gather all active employees.
2. Pass employee IDs through the Employment endpoint and store the employee types you want to track—this count is the denominator.
3. Refresh the Directory and Employment endpoints regularly to track new employees and any changes to job title, department, compensation, or direct reports to calculate the number of internal movements—this is the numerator. You should also account for new hires and former employees which shouldn’t necessarily factor into this metric.

Learn how to ensure equitable promotions for your customers’ employees.

2. Compensation history

Any income an employee earns in the course of their regular employment is considered part of their compensation history. This can include their salary, bonuses they’ve received, commissions they’ve earned, and tips.

Knowing this information is important because it gives you a deeper understanding of your customers’ compensation distribution. This helps you flag potential areas of inequity or inconsistency across different teams, demographics, and positions, allowing your customers to improve employee retention in the long run and offer competitive compensation packages that draw top-quality talent.

How to calculate compensation history

To calculate compensation history, simply add an employee’s salary, bonuses, commissions, tips/wages, and any other sources of income together for the time period you want to track.

Pulling compensation data from Finch

To gain the most visibility into employee earnings, you’ll want to leverage both Payment and Pay Statement endpoints as well as the Employment endpoint, which contains data like base income and pay frequency.

1. First, call the Directory endpoint to gather all active employees.
2. Then, call the Payment endpoint and input the date range you are interested in to pull in earnings for that period.
3. Lastly, call the Pay Statement endpoint, and aggregate gross income for each employee.

Alternatively, many providers can also provide access to historical compensation changes which Finch surfaces in the Employment endpoint under the income history array. This array will include the unit, amount, currency, and effective date of previous income changes.

Read more about how companies can build responsible compensation plans.

3. Turnover rate

Employee turnover rate is the percentage of employees that leave an organization within a given period. You can use this data to drill down into more specific subsets of your customers’ organizations like individual departments or demographic groups.

If your product is centered around increasing engagement or employee retention, this data is crucial, as it allows you to spot potential issues that can save your customers money and improve employee morale and retention over the long term.

How to calculate turnover rate

To calculate an organization’s turnover rate, you’ll want to divide the employees that left over a particular span of time by the average number of employees for that same period.

Pulling turnover rate from Finch

Pulling the data you need to calculate turnover rate from Finch is a simple process:

1. As with the other entries on this list, you’ll first make a call to the Directory endpoint to gather all employees.
2. Then, call the Employment endpoint to aggregate start and termination dates.
3. Lastly, take all the employees whose termination dates fall within the last year, and divide it by the average number of employees who were active during that same period.

Find out what turnover rate can tell you about your customers’ business.

Align insights with your customers' goals

By leveraging the above insights, you’ll be able to better add value to your customers’ organizations—helping them streamline employee development, increase employee engagement, and boost team cohesion. This creates a better work experience that makes them more likely to retain their workers—and retain your platform’s services.

Discover how Finch helps you harness the power of employment data to provide your customers with key insights in real time. Click here to sign up for free.

Want to get in touch with our friends at Charthop to unlock people insights for your organization? Click here to learn more about what you can do when all your people data is in one place.

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.

Employment system integrations—that is, integrations with HR information systems and payroll systems—typically fall under the purview of product teams, but that doesn’t mean that they are strictly a product concern. In fact, a well executed employment system integration strategy has the potential to affect a myriad of aspects of your organization for the better, including your growth trajectory, opportunities for expansion, and expenses.

In other words, the decision to integrate with employment systems is a business one. As you weigh your options, consider these eight KPIs that employment system integrations often impact:

Growth KPIs

1. New logo acquisitions

Employment system integrations enlarge the field of customers you can work with by enabling instant compatibility with the employment systems they use, allowing you to close more deals with a wider range of organizations.

This is especially true if your strategy entails partnering with a broad-coverage employment system API like Finch that enables connectivity with many systems from a single integration. In turn, your sales team is empowered to pursue segments of the market that would otherwise be uneconomic due to lack of connectivity. With Finch’s 150+ integrations, you can service 88% of U.S. employers—and many international ones—in one fell swoop.

Learn how Green Spaces was able to address 90% of potential customers by expanding its integration coverage with Finch.

With Finch’s single, universal API, Green Places gained real-time connectivity to more than 90% of its customers’ HR platforms. Just as critically, Finch affords Green Places more time and bandwidth to allocate to other areas of product development.

2. Sales cycle length

Increasingly, the availability of employment system integrations is an important purchase criterion. Having integrations in place at the outset of your engagement meets a key expectation of potential customers, which can help fast-track them through the sales pipeline to a signed contract.

On the other hand, if you’re following a bottom-up sales model, you’ll appreciate that employment system integrations enable a seamless data sync process that supports self-serve onboarding and product-led growth. In other words, leads can start using your product without having to speak to a sales rep, bypassing an extended sales pipeline altogether.

See how Mosaic was able to accelerate their sales pipeline and go live with integrations 94% faster than doing it in-house by working with Finch.

3. Average contract value

Many applications realize a boost in ACV when they offer integrations as part of a premium tier of service or product access. Because employment system integrations can save your customers hours of work at onboarding and fuel deluxe features and product enhancements, you can leverage integrations to persuade customers to sign larger deals.

4. Free-to-paid conversion

If your product offers a self-serve motion accompanied by a free trial, data syncing via employment system integrations indicates a lead’s high intent to pay for your product. By granting access to their employment data, they’ve signified that they trust your value proposition and want to see your product drive ROI for their business.

Learn how MainStreet saved $65M+ for small business clients using a self-serve flow powered by Finch.

Expansion KPIs

5. Logo retention

Acquiring new customers is helpful, but keeping them around for the long-term is how you build a sustainable business. Data connectivity via employment system integrations supports retention in multiple ways:

• It makes for stickier customer relationships. Since your product is directly connected to your customers’ source of truth, and they’ve already configured their workflow based on how your product ingests their raw employment data, they’re highly invested.
• By syncing with census data, you can track champions, buyers, and other key stakeholders within a customer organization and proactively reach out when organization changes occur, helping to ensure a continuous relationship.
• If your product drives employee retention, you can measure the impact of your product on individual team and organization-wide retention rates from the time of implementation. That way, when renewals come up, you’re able to concretely demonstrate ROI.

6. Revenue retention

If your product relies on a usage-based business model driven by seats or per-employee-per-month (PEPM) growth, access to customers’ employment data gives you a direct line of sight into the potential size of their contract. It also streamlines the process of expanding usage by giving your customers the ability to track new employees and automate user invites.

Additionally, if your product has multiple buyers across an organization—say, finance and HR—you can leverage your access to real-time organizational structure data to cross-sell your product into other teams.

Cost KPIs

7. Engineering expenses

If you build employment system integrations in-house, the initiative will likely be a drain on your development resources. Assuming that three engineers will work on an integration for three months (or more, if your needs go beyond basic census data), that puts the engineering costs of just your initial build-out in the ballpark of $200,000. Multiply that by the number of integrations you need to adequately cover your customer base plus maintenance costs, and you are looking at a steep, ongoing investment.

Outsourcing employment system integrations to a third-party API like Finch saves you money by eliminating the need for multiple build-outs and drastically reducing the number of hours your engineering team has to dedicate to the project. Our team does the heavy lifting, including maintenance, so your internal talent can focus on your product’s core technology and UX.

Find out how Trainual reduced development costs by 75% by using Finch.

8. Support costs

During onboarding and implementation, customers often require hand-holding—and one of the biggest hurdles they cross is data syncing. That means that your support team needs to be trained in the specific data syncing processes, formats, and idiosyncrasies of each system you integrate with—a monumental and costly training initiative. Even then, it often requires three to four calls with a customer to confirm connectivity. These are costs that don’t scale and can balloon as your customer base expands. Employment system integrations reduce the data syncing process from days to seconds and remove the friction that necessitates hand-holding in the first place, allowing you to save support resources for initiatives that increase customer loyalty.

Learn how Lane Health reduced support costs and eliminated 8-12 hours a month of manual data entry for their customers with Finch.

Accelerating success

Integrating with employment systems isn’t just a slick product enhancement; it’s a strategic business initiative that drives measurable impact across your organization. Much of the ROI, however, depends on prudent execution—namely, partnering with a universal employment system API like Finch that can optimize coverage, performance, and cost efficiencies.

In short, Finch does the hard work of integrating with HRIS and payroll systems for you, so you can optimize the return. Our dynamic, unified API offers read-and-write access and abstracts away inconsistencies across systems for exceptional usability no matter the source.

Talk to one of our experts today to learn how Finch’s employment integrations can drive business outcomes for you.

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.  

Eugenie Ma always knew she wanted to pursue a career in recruiting. After working as a tech recruiter in a variety of sectors, from IoT to public safety, she found herself at Finch helping to build a world-class team. Read on to discover what Eugenie looks for in a job candidate, why she makes diversity, equity, and inclusion a top priority in her work, and where she prefers to spend her free time.

Can you tell us about your role at Finch?

I was hired as Finch’s first internal recruiter to build the foundational pieces of our talent function. Besides building processes, I review resumes, screen applicants, and provide candidate support. One important element of my work is ensuring that candidates fully understand our company goals and how they would fit into the puzzle as part of Finch’s team. I want them to be fully comfortable with their decision to build with us.

Like all my colleagues, I wear multiple hats. I’ve been fortunate enough to work both in people operations and on employer branding projects.

What does a great candidate fit look like at Finch?

It really depends on the role. They probably already embody our core values—execution, curiosity, humility, and empathy. Our organization is quite unique because we all come from different walks of life. Our range of experiences enables us to come up with creative solutions together.

However, at the end of the day, it’s all about being organized and being willing to navigate ambiguous situations, so I look for those qualities in an applicant as well.

Do you have any advice for applicants?

First impressions have a lasting impact. That means submitting an error-free and reader-friendly resume. Then, let your authentic self shine through during the interview process. We want to celebrate your track record and learn how you’ve conquered challenges. It’s also okay to ask clarifying questions after conducting your initial research.

Did you always know you wanted to work in tech?

Actually, if someone had told me I was going to work in tech, I wouldn’t have believed them. My undergraduate degree was in business administration. I was lucky enough to find a mentor who took a chance on me. She offered a recruiting internship at an internet of things (IoT) company, and the rest was history. After that, I moved into the machine learning and computer vision space, then into public safety.

How did you end up at Finch?

Jeremy, one of Finch’s co-founders, reached out when I was an executive recruiter at Amazon. I missed working with technical populations and building meaningful processes, so I tried my hand at consulting. I could tell Finch was going to be a great fit because of how friendly everyone was. They would go out of their way to check in with me, even though I wasn’t a full-time member of their team. That’s rare—especially in a remote work environment.

Initially, I did top-of-funnel projects like generating lists of prospects, but that quickly evolved into more strategic work like crafting messaging and fine-tuning interview structures.

What motivates you to show up to work each day?

I want to leave the world a better place, and the possibility that I’ll change even one life makes everything worth it. We spend a majority of our adult lives working, so we should operate in engaging spaces. As a career matchmaker, I help people navigate the job market and align them with roles that energize them.

Finch is the youngest startup I’ve been a part of, and I’m excited to apply the lessons I’ve learned in previous positions as we grow. Plus, working with brilliant people goes a long way. Everyone at Finch is driven and process-oriented, which is a welcome change from some larger companies.

Is there an aspect of talent acquisition that especially inspires you?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion. Diversity goes beyond meeting checkbox requirements; it’s the diversity of thought and expressions that unlocks success. Someone once told me that it’s pointless to extend party invitations if attendees aren’t given the opportunity to dance and mingle. When it comes to recruiting, we’re striving to cultivate spaces where team members can be bold and know that their thoughts are being heard.

I’m an introverted extrovert, so I appreciate having a high level of autonomy, ownership, and impact while bringing my authentic self to the table. It’s important to me that others feel that same sense of trust and worth.

What have you learned from your teammates?

When I first started, I was very impressed with our doc center and standard operating procedures. Things were very well organized for a team of our size and stage. I’ve learned how to fine-tune my project management skills and how to create detailed documents with clear goals. Diana Liu is especially talented when it comes to project management, and she has really shown me the ropes.

How do you get to know your colleagues?

We’re a remote-first team, so all communication is very intentional. Unlike collaborating in a physical office space, we can’t just hang out at the water cooler to have spontaneous conversations. But we’ve been using Gather Town as a virtual office space to build meaningful relationships, so the ability to verbally brainstorm, whiteboard, and play games with one another is only a click away.

We also have a strong one-to-one peer-manager culture; we’re constantly adjusting our communication methods as we continue to scale.

What advice would you give a new hire on their first day at Finch?

Don’t be afraid to ask questions and ask for help. Curiosity is one of our core values, and everybody at Finch is exceedingly gracious and thoughtful. Leverage the resources you have, and meet proactively with your manager as much as possible. Those early conversations are crucial for setting the expectations both for yourself and for your team.

What are you passionate about outside of work?

I’m a yogi in the making—but if I’m not at my local studio, I’m probably at the gym or reading in Central Park. I’ve also started bouldering.

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

Exhilarating. Things change all the time! There’s always something going on, and there’s always something to do. There’s never a moment of boredom.

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

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.

Time in the startup world moves fast—something Sean Breen knows from experience. After getting his start as an intern at a venture capital firm in Washington D.C., he quickly immersed himself in the ecosystem of enterprise companies and their founders, eventually making his mark as the territory account executive for Mapbox, a billion-dollar mapping platform. After hitting the job market a few years later in search of a new challenge, Sean met his match with Finch. Read on to hear Sean talk about the road that led him to our team and how he has been able to succeed.

How did you hear about Finch?

I was referred to Finch by a company they use for placements called Candidate Labs. It was at the point in my career where I was ready for change and looking for a fresh challenge to energize me. When I met Ansel and Jeremy, Finch’s co-founders, I immediately understood what they were trying to build. I understood their business model and had prior experience selling technical products to developers. But meeting the team and feeling the chemistry was what sealed the deal for me.

Can you describe your role?

In the beginning, it was all about building processes. Since then, it has evolved into generating new business and growing sales. Getting new customers to join Finch is my main job, but because we’re a startup, I also work with the engineering and product teams to understand what the market is telling us and communicate that internally.

What does your work with the product and engineering teams look like?

It's very bidirectional. We're building our roadmap based on what we think the market needs and, at the same time, the market is telling us what it actually needs.

Did you always want to end up in sales?

Not at all. I was a chemistry and economics major in school. Going into the workforce, I wanted to figure out what my abilities were and what I might be more naturally inclined at than others. A few of my mentors suggested sales. The first thing I pictured was the stereotype that everybody associates with sales, but I was intrigued by how consultative the field can be. It’s more than just selling. I’m thankful for my mentors and the conversations we had that led me here.

What do you think has made you successful in a sales role?

Along with being naturally curious, I’d say it’s the ability to hear what someone is saying at face value and then deduce what will best solve their problem. Oftentimes, the real value that people are looking for is one or two layers deeper than what they might communicate. For me, it presents a fun puzzle to solve.

What excites you about your work?

I love that it's so dynamic. I’m a naturally curious person, and I like to get into the weeds. Working at a startup, some days are harder than others for a variety of reasons. You don’t know what you’re going to get. At the same time, you exercise a real impact on the company, the team, and your own career. Outside of fulfilling my own needs, it’s important to me to help other people fulfill theirs.

How do you structure your day to optimize your time?

I’ve found that simplicity is key. There are three things that I need to do to have a good day: drink water, work out, and get outside. I structure my day around these very clear objectives to ensure I can be the best version of myself both professionally and personally.

What are you passionate about outside work?

I like being outside and moving around. Last year I did a couple of endurance races, but my biggest passion outside of work is helping to organize the D.C. Bike Party. It’s a once-a-month social ride that attracts 600 to 1,000 people. We tow around a large sound system and have a DJ play music, but it’s more than just a party on wheels. We’re bringing music, the arts, and joy to the city.

What do you like best about working at Finch?

The people. Every company is going to have its customers and its product, but it’s the people that you’re working with and going through challenges with that make a major difference. The longer I’ve been at Finch, the more I realize how great my teammates are.

Being a remote-first company, how do you create strong relationships with your teammates?

Zoom. It sounds weird, but having conversations where you can see someone’s face gets you 70% of the way there. And then, because we’re a remote-first company, there’s greater emphasis on building relationships at any time, not just during office hours. For example, I was skiing in Utah and arranged to meet up with my co-worker, Sam. We skied a full day together. It was like we’d been friends for decades.

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

The importance of process. Passion can get you a long way when it comes to certain endeavors, but process helps you scale. That’s a lesson I’ve learned in my time here, and I already feel like I can apply it to future projects.

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

We’re now an EHIR trusted partner!

Finch and EHIR are partnering to help innovative companies empower employers with health, wellness, and productivity solutions for their workforces. We’re excited to announce that we’ll be supporting their academy, innovator, and alumni communities with our employment data platform.

What is EHIR?

EHIR is a coalition of more than 75 of the world’s leading employers, including Apple, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Nestlé, Target, and Disney, that find and accelerate solutions to help employees attain their best health. The objective support and valuable insight EHIR provides helps member organizations navigate the shifting employer landscape and stay ahead of the curve.

Over the past six years, EHIR has worked diligently to identify and evaluate the most promising emerging health and wellness solutions in HR tech. Now, after undergoing a thorough vetting process, we’re proud to announce that EHIR has recognized Finch as a trusted partner in its exclusive network.

The important role of EHIR in today’s health benefits landscape

The pandemic has changed the way many people think about health and telehealth services. Meanwhile, the Great Resignation has afforded employees greater bargaining power, putting pressure on employers to provide more and increasingly progressive benefits.

Due to the growing demand for technology that addresses these challenges, many HR tech startups are entering the market. With so many products to choose from, it can be difficult for employers to understand which best suit the needs of their employees.

Why Finch was chosen and what it means

As an independent organization, EHIR provides employers with recommendations they can trust—saving them time and money.

By unifying data access to multiple HRIS and payroll systems through a single integration, Finch meets EHIR’s criteria as an innovative platform their community members can rely on to help them tackle data syncing challenges. We’re honored by the distinction and excited for the opportunity to support EHIR’s change-making mission.

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

Problem: Green Places relies on customers’ HR data to perform key carbon footprint calculations. To get what it needs, Green Places had to ask customers to upload the data via spreadsheets and CSV files—a high-friction, time-consuming, and low-fidelity process.

Solution: By integrating with Finch, Green Places has direct, secure, and permissioned data connectivity to 90% of the HR platforms its customers use every day—saving customers 5 to 7 hours at onboarding and unlocking new possibilities for Green Places’ product roadmap.

Collective action against climate change

It has never been more critical for businesses to minimize their environmental impact, but traditional pathways to assessing and reducing a business’ carbon footprint are, for many businesses, prohibitively expensive.

Green Places is changing that. Through its tech-first, science-backed approach to calculating, reducing, and offsetting emissions, Green Places is making sustainability attainable, so that businesses of all sizes have the power and opportunity to make a difference.

A friction-filled onboarding flow

To arrive at accurate emissions calculations, Green Places taps into many different kinds of data sources, including utility companies, databases managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, Google Maps, business accounting systems, and more.

One of Green Places’ most important data sources is the HR platforms its customers use to manage their human capital. HR platforms house many of the keystone data attributes Green Places depends on, including the number of employees a customer has, where each employee is based, and the location of their workspace. When combined with data from other sources, Green Places can determine important markers like how much clean energy versus fossil fuels a customer expends to power its physical operations and the total environmental impact of its employees’ commute.

But without direct connectivity to HR platforms, Green Places had to ask its customers to upload their HR data manually via spreadsheets and CSV files. It was tedious, time-consuming, and compromised Green Places’ mission to put seamless sustainability within reach.

The impact of connectivity

Green Places knew it had to automate the data retrieval process and set a goal of pulling 80% of emissions data across all source types. But when it came to HR data, Green Places found that most integration providers lacked breadth and depth of coverage. The sustainability platform was about to embark on a piecemeal initiative to cobble together multiple partial solutions, when it learned about Finch.

Above all, Green Places was impressed with Finch’s comprehensive coverage. With Finch’s single, universal API, Green Places gained real-time connectivity to more than 90% of its customers’ HR platforms. Just as critically, Finch affords Green Places more time and bandwidth to allocate to other areas of product development.

"We’ve always had the goal of making our product as straightforward as possible through integrations. So, now that we have a universal integration into HR platforms through Finch, we can devote our time to focusing on unlocking commerce data and other data silos."

Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO

Where Finch fits in

Since partnering with Finch, customers have the option to securely connect their HR platform directly to Green Places’ system. From start to finish, the connection takes moments:

1. Customers select their HR platform from the options provided.
2. They sync their account and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch's secure, compliant, and white-labeled Connect modal.

Instantly, via a single API integration, Green Places has access to the data it needs to perform 40% of a customer’s emissions calculations. Meanwhile, customers are spared anywhere from 5 to 7 hours they would otherwise spend manually collecting and uploading HR data.

Fueling future innovation

Finch also opens up a world of potential for the sustainability platform.

Traditionally, carbon accounting is based on historical data, but with Finch’s live data connection, Green Places is uniquely positioned to upend the status quo and build carbon accounting services that are based on real-time computations.

Green Places is also planning to leverage Finch’s comprehensive HR endpoints, including employee email addresses, to fuel a higher degree of employee interaction. The goal is to foster authentic sustainability cultures within workplaces that influence systemic change.

"With Finch, we have the opportunity to make sustainability and green policies core to employees’ work experience, so that change doesn’t just happen at the top; it comes from all directions."

Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO

At Finch, we’ve made it our mission to support innovative platforms like Green Places access the global employment ecosystem. If you’re interested in learning more about the potential and power of workforce data, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.

While working in quality assurance at Checkr, Lauren Wan discovered her passion for product optimization. Her willingness to confront new challenges head-on and her knack for quickly getting to the root of a problem has made her a valuable addition to Finch. Read on to see what Lauren has learned on the job and the helpful advice she’d offer others starting out in product operations.‌    

What does it mean to work in product operations at Finch?

I’m part of a team that’s responsible for operationalizing and optimizing our product. A big part of it is being a subject matter expert on the many payroll systems we integrate with so we can help inform engineering decisions and provide insights when our customers reach out with questions.

If I were to break down my day-to-day, the big categories would be researching different payroll systems, building and iterating on processes and SOPs, investigating issues our customers have surfaced, and providing hands-on support. While I’m not a highly technical person, I love learning how a product functions and translating that to non-technical and operations folks.

What did you do before Finch?

I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in managerial economics and had various internships throughout college. One of my main projects was at the university research office, where I performed data quality assurance for a new website launch.

That’s what led me to Checkr, which was one of my first jobs out of college. I started there as a quality assurance associate in operations, which meant ensuring the accuracy of background check reports by investigating criminal records, researching court documents, and analyzing compliance laws. I was in that department for three and a half years, ultimately getting promoted to manager. Eventually, I realized that, while I loved helping the people on my team grow, I was mostly passionate about optimizing our product by rooting out inefficiencies and reducing manual workloads.

That’s what drove me to product operations, which was my final role at Checkr. I was in that position for nine or ten months before making the transition to Finch.

How did you learn about this opportunity at Finch, and why did you decide to go for it?

I heard about the position through Diana, who I worked with at Checkr. She posted on Instagram that Finch was hiring, and I reached out to learn more. I wanted to understand what product ops meant in a broader context and where my skill set might fit in. That led to conversations with Finch’s co-founders, Jeremy and Ansel, which really got the ball rolling.

I loved my team and role at Checkr, but I was ready for a new challenge. The idea of learning about a brand new product and industry was exciting, and Finch felt like a great fit. I’d known for a while that I wanted to join a smaller startup and truly contribute to its growth, and I appreciated the thoughtfulness that Jeremy and Ansel brought to the interview process. They made a point of going through all the reasons that I stood out as a candidate, and that was a defining moment for me. It really demonstrated the fantastic culture at Finch.

What would you say you’ve learned so far in your time at Finch?

Of course, I’ve learned a lot about our product and how it works, but one thing that’s emphasized at Finch is running toward problems, not away from them. Even if you’re not the person who can solve a specific problem, that doesn’t mean that it won’t impact you in some way. I’ve learned the importance of finding the right people to help you tackle an issue and collaborating with them to find a way forward.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

In product ops, you’re often operating in ambiguity. There are thousands of payroll systems out there. If a customer makes a detailed request, or if we’re exploring new integrations, I may have to explore payroll systems I’ve never worked with before. It can be challenging, but it’s very rewarding when I’m able to find the right solution.

Is there a particular project you’ve been especially proud to work on?

One of my larger projects is studying different payroll systems to understand the specific set of permissions a user needs to implement to successfully call each of our API endpoints—allowing us to provide more granular error messaging to our customers. It requires a lot of up-front research and testing across payroll systems, and it’s been super exciting to work on. The impact to our customers is going to be huge.

If someone were joining your team, what advice would you offer them?

Be flexible, and understand that what your role looks like this month may not necessarily be what it looks like next month. That’s certainly been the case for me. Product ops is a unique team, in that we’re interacting with payroll systems day in and day out—probably more than any other team at Finch. So, the requests we see from customers and internal teams can take many forms.

What keeps you busy outside of work?

I’ve recently rediscovered my love of reading. I have a goal to read 52 books in 52 weeks, and I try to read a little each night before going to bed. Right now, I’m just two books behind schedule.

I also travel a lot. I moved to Denver three years ago, but I probably only spend 40% of my time here. My partner lives in Miami, and my family lives in San Francisco, so I get to split my time between these very different cities. It’s great just biking around, exploring new neighborhoods, and trying out new restaurants.

What would you say makes Finch a great company to work for?

The people here are incredible. Everyone is so hardworking and always willing to help. They’re also genuine and kind, which speaks volumes to the culture we’re building at Finch. The company as a whole has done a great job of creating a space where people feel comfortable being themselves, and there are many different personalities in the mix.

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

Scrappy. The team has doubled in size since I joined six months ago, but we’re still small, and everyone still wears multiple hats. I love that no one’s afraid to roll up their sleeves and get in the weeds to solve problems.

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

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.

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To best serve their SMB customers, technology-first companies are looking to leverage the power of payroll and HR data—but with nearly 6K payroll systems on the market, that can mean building out many tedious integrations. Fortunately, there’s a better way.

After the unprecedented challenges wrought by the global pandemic, many SMBs are bouncing back—and many others are first opening their doors—to a dramatically different landscape.

Most notable is the seismic shift in focus from productivity to people as employers look to recruit and retain talent amid the Great Resignation, strengthen their work culture and benefits, and foster better relationships with their employees. For innovative companies serving SMBs, meeting these needs requires careful analysis and considerable support from the data tied up in SMBs’ payroll systems.

Unfortunately, comprehensive payroll data is getting harder and harder to access. There are almost 6,000 payroll providers in the U.S. alone, and recent trends are causing that number to grow.

For SMB-focused companies to keep up, they need to understand what the current payroll market looks like, which factors are driving diversification, and how using APIs that span multiple systems can help them access more data, build smarter and faster solutions for SMB customers, and ultimately boost their business. In this post, we break it all down.

A heavily fragmented market

The latest data indicates there are approximately 5,700 payroll providers in the U.S., with a combined annual revenue of around $48 billion.

The top three payroll providers—Intuit Quickbooks, ADP Run, and Paycheck Flex—cover almost half (45%) of SMB employers nationwide. But extending to the top 10 only increases that coverage to 55%. For comparison, the top 10 accounting systems collectively cover 95% of the SMB market.

What’s more, beyond the top three, all other payroll providers each have less than 4% of the total market share, with coverage quickly tapering off. A number of these are newer platforms—like Gusto, Zenefits, and Rippling—that have appeared over the last decade to satisfy evolving SMB needs and a growing demand for self-serve products with transparent pricing.

That means we can expect the industry to grow even more fractured in the coming years, as innovators continue to emerge and respond to changing market conditions.

In particular, there are three trends to watch that are spurring fragmentation in the U.S. payroll market. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Trend 1: SMBs typically pick a payroll provider based on their demographics.

A business’s payroll system plays a critical role in its operations, and switching platforms comes at a high cost—so picking the right provider is essential. Still, SMBs often select a payroll provider based solely on demographics, including factors like:

• Number of employees: As an organization grows, it encounters a broader and more complex range of compliance requirements and payroll schedules.
• Industry: Different industries hire different types of workers (e.g., seasonal, temp, salaried, hourly, apprentice, and interns), each with its own HR workflows.

Only secondarily will SMBs look to the core capabilities and key features of the platform itself—such as options for customization, time tracking, benefits, insurance, and customer support. That means SMBs may not look for the best provider overall, but the best fit for their business.

Trend 2: World events are reshaping SMB purchasing decisions.

External circumstances—above all, the lingering effects of the pandemic—also impact how SMBs think about payroll and the support they need from their payroll providers.

Some of the most pressing considerations include:

• The competitive labor market, which has made it difficult for SMB employers to attract and keep high-performing employees. Some providers offer a suite of recruiting and retention tools like pay analytics and talent sourcing services to help hire in a tough environment.
• Hybrid work models, which are becoming common, especially in white-collar industries where being on-site is less essential to productivity. Some payroll providers offer a range of remote workforce management solutions to onboard and oversee dispersed employees.
• New regulations that are emerging to protect employee and contractor rights and bolster workplace safety requirements. Some payroll providers build compliance tools into their platforms, so employers can easily adapt to new rules and avoid hefty penalties.

Industries that have their own regulatory bodies and in-person staffing needs—like food service, hospitality, construction, and agriculture—are particularly vulnerable to shifting conditions and face an even more complex decision when choosing a provider to accom modate them.

Trend 3: White-labeled and embedded solutions are powering new, tech-forward platforms.

White-labeled and embedded solutions allow other companies to build payroll capabilities into their existing systems—essentially enabling any platform to become a payroll provider.

• White-labeled platforms like iSolved and PrismHR allow HR systems, service bureaus, and professional employment organizations (PEOs) to keep their current branding and service models while providing the underlying infrastructure to power a range of human capital management (HCM) solutions.
• Embedded payroll platforms—such as Gusto, Check, Zeal, and Salsa—use an API to embed a payroll application into an existing product. While still nascent, this market has the potential to expand across vertical SaaS, the gig economy, HR tech, and fintech.

As this technology advances, it’s becoming easier for new companies to add payroll to their list of services and capabilities—and harder for a single provider to win a market majority.

The problem with payroll fragmentation

Market fragmentation means businesses serving SMBs have to integrate and coordinate with multiple payroll providers to cover a sufficient swath of their customers. It’s hard enough to build and maintain an integration with one platform—let alone hundreds or thousands.

Integrating with the top one, three, or ten payroll providers might allow a company to cover half of their customer base. But to efficiently serve the other half—or tap into new regions and industries—would require many incremental builds, draining time and resources.

To tackle this coverage issue, many fintechs, benefits platforms, and other B2B companies are turning to digital solutions that take a more comprehensive approach to payroll data and roll hundreds of payroll integrations into a single platform. That’s where Finch comes in.

How Finch can help

Finch’s universal API connects to an extensive network of payroll systems, and we are continually adding new integrations. Right now, we have compatibility with over 150 systems, and that number is always growing.

That means, with Finch, product teams designing solutions for SMBs don’t have to worry about building any integrations in house or reconciling inconsistent data outputs from different systems—they get secure, standardized, and effortlessly scalable access to the fragmented payroll market right out of the box.

To start building with Finch, click or tap “Get API keys” on our homepage.

Since 2020, the pace of experiences going virtual has snowballed – corporate learning and development (L&D) is no exception. Coupled with pressing talent concerns, L&D leaders across industries and verticals are poised to invest in learning management systems (LMS) that meet their need to remotely onboard, train, reskill, and upskill while also solving for their pain points around administration, organization, and analytics. Learning management systems that prioritize exceptional experiences for LMS admins and learners stand to come out on top.

One element of creating a best-in-class LMS experience is payroll and HR integrations. By connecting to the software employers use to manage their workforce, learning management systems can unlock product functions and features that set new bars in the LMS category.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the L&D pain points HR and payroll integrations alleviate and how you can leverage them to optimize your own LMS platform in ways that meet or exceed your customers’ expectations.

The L&D landscape

Before we do, let’s dig into the mindset of your customers with a brief overview of the corporate L&D landscape, which is taking on new importance in the wake of COVID-19 and the social and economic forces defining our current reality.

For one, companies are struggling—both to keep employees motivated and to close skill gaps internally without resorting to expensive (and often unfruitful) talent recruitment initiatives. They’re also responding to demands to improve the DEI fluency of their teams and foster an authentically inclusive workplace culture. Then, there’s the growth of remote work and the need for virtual onboarding and training solutions to replace in-person experiences.

At many companies, L&D has been expected to bear the brunt of these challenges and more, earning L&D a place among c-suite priorities. The numbers bear this out:

• 72% of professionals polled agree that L&D has become a more strategic function at their organization.
• In Q3 2021, demand for L&D specialists grew 94% compared to Q2 that same year.
• 48% of L&D leaders worldwide, including 51% in North America, expect their budgets to increase in 2022—a six-year high.

Unsurprisingly, L&D teams are feeling more pressure to deliver on performance as well as more demands on their time. A recent survey found that the number of different L&D initiatives being deployed in 2022 has increased across the board, stretching L&D professionals thin.

To cope with their growing pains, L&D teams are looking to technology. Perhaps more than ever, they expect LMS solutions to save them time, drive learner engagement, and offer analytics that help them deliver the results they’ve been tasked with achieving.

L&D pain points

Specifically, L&D professionals are concerned about three key areas of LMS functionality and performance:

• Admin time: L&D professionals want to spend fewer hours onboarding employees into learning management systems, enrolling them in courses, and managing and tracking their progress.
• User adoption: To meet their objectives, L&D professionals need an LMS that employees want to use and do use. This is usually a function of an LMS being easy and enjoyable to navigate and engage with.
• Analytics: It’s critical for L&D professionals to be able to view and assess the impact a particular course or learning module is having, so they can adjust their approach accordingly, report on progress, and prove their value to leadership teams.

Enter integrations

An important element of solving these pain points for your customers is HR and payroll system integrations.

When you integrate with your customers’ HR and payroll systems, your LMS has access to their full trove of employee census data like name, job title, department, location, and much more. In turn, you unlock numerous opportunities to make your product more effective and efficient in ways that meet and exceed your customers’ expectations.

Here are just some of the ways HR and payroll integrations help you build a best-in-class LMS experience for your customers:

• Admin automation: With access to employee census data, HR and payroll system integrations make it possible to build numerous features that take the manual work out of tedious tasks like onboarding users, program invitations, course enrollments, compliance tracking, and user deactivations. Instead of requiring L&D professionals to enter and manage this information themselves, or upload and reconcile clunky CSV files containing sensitive employee data, integrations pull the data instantly and output it in a normalized, actionable format for your LMS to consume and leverage.
• Optimal engagement: In retrieving data like job titles, department, and location, HR and payroll integrations provide the visibility your LMS needs to create hyper-personalized journeys that are tailored to the skill sets, interests, seniority, and location-specific compliance requirements of your customers’ individual employees. By offering employees an experience just for them, they are more likely to enjoy and complete courses and modules, and L&D professionals are more likely to be satisfied with the engagement rates your LMS generates.
• Valuable insights: The data that HR and payroll systems unlock can be used to identify correlations between courses and modules completed and things like compensation, job performance, and promotions. These insights can be pulled into your LMS’s dashboard to provide visibility into ROI and impact. In turn, L&D professionals not only have documentation of the value of their work, they can also make adjustments to their strategies and policies as needed to optimize that value.

Your integration options

Assuming you’re sold on the value of HR and payroll system integrations, you have a couple of options. You can either build and maintain the integrations in-house—a complicated, resource-draining undertaking—or you can outsource integrations to a specialist like Finch.

With Finch, you get all the benefits of integrations without sacrificing your internal bandwidth. Our single, universal API makes it possible to access comprehensive data sets from an ever-growing number of HR and payroll providers (142 at the time of publication) with minimal coding and zero maintenance responsibilities.

Compare that to building in-house, which can cost companies in the vicinity of $300,000, including upfront development and ongoing upkeep.

The unique value of Finch

Aside from cost savings, Finch standardizes data from disparate sources, so it’s immediately and optimally usable without intervention from your team or your customers—allowing you to focus on what you do best without having to worry about which of the many, many HR systems or payroll providers your customers use (check out our whitepaper on the fragmented US payroll landscape here).

Perhaps the most tangible benefit of Finch, though, is its effect on onboarding. What once took 30 days worth of file uploads, hand-holding, and back-and-forth correspondence with your customers is reduced to a quick and easy 30 seconds and completed entirely within your LMS. The process is simple:

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

We do all the legwork. For you and your customers, there’s nothing more to it.

Then there’s the matter of upkeep. When you go with Finch, integration maintenance is entirely in our court. So, instead of spending an average of 27 minutes on the phone with an HR or payroll provider trying to connect to their infrastructure so you can troubleshoot any inevitable issues that arise, you shoot us a support ticket, and we take care of it, reducing your effort to something closer to 27 seconds.

Concentrate on your competencies

In essence, Finch ensures you can take advantage of everything HR and payroll integrations offer without any of the internal hassles or capacity issues you’d run into by keeping the work in-house. Consequently, you’ll have more internal resources to dedicate to your core product, allowing you to get to market sooner and accelerate your roadmap.

Want to know more about integrations for LMS platforms?

To start building with Finch, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.

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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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Although we’re fully remote at Finch, we host bi-annual in-person offsites!  

We had approximately 20 team members gathered at our last offsite (April 2022) in Lake Tahoe. We celebrated our recent growth, bonded over a variety of team activities, and had a blast snowshoeing, skiing, and relaxing at the spa.

Sharing some photos below – huge thanks to the team for being so engaged throughout the whole offsite, and can’t wait for the next one!

About Finch

Finch is a remote-first company; our team members are located across the United States and Canada. Visit our BuiltIn page to learn more about our culture and how you can make an impact (We were just featured in a BuiltIn article, check us out here!) We’re passionate about our company values of execution, curiosity, humility, and empathy.

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

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 under a decade, Erik Demaree went from working at the Bloomberg Help Desk to being solely responsible for Auth0's North American corporate, mid-market and small business sales teams—firmly cementing his success as a leader in B2B tech sales. That drive, coupled with his proven track record for selling APIs and his interest in identifying and unlocking economic opportunities, made him a natural fit for Finch. Read on to hear from Erik himself about his move to our team and the leadership principles he’s bringing with him.

You’ve been at Finch for about three months now. What were you doing previously?

After college, I worked at Bloomberg in New York before moving back to Seattle. I took a job at Auth0, which was a relatively small company at the time, and stayed with them for almost six years. Over the course of my time there, I moved my way up from a business development representative role to running commercial sales. After Okta acquired Auth0, I started my job search.

How did your job search lead you to Finch?

I had a list of things that I wanted in a new company, and I found it in Finch. I wanted to move into a role that would allow me to apply the learnings I had accumulated while offering me more focused ownership over the go-to-market process. I wanted a company with a blue-chip investment team, a product that is the core of application-building and primarily sold to developers and product managers. I wanted to sell an API that can unlock economic opportunities. In terms of leadership, I was looking for founders that are very, very, very hungry.

What does it mean, on a practical level, to be VP of sales?

My mandate is to operationalize our entire go-to-market function. That includes building out the sales team, creating a sales playbook, and working with marketing to coalesce everything into a brand and a pitch that we can sell.

What does success look like in your role?

The thing we've been focusing on, within the sales team, is that a good today is better than a perfect tomorrow. We prioritize pushing stuff out, moving forward, and then learning from that. If we need to augment or iterate, that's completely okay.

We’ll never be “done” with building out the sales process. We're always looking for ways to improve ourselves, increase conversions, and close larger deals. Therefore, what success looks like now is very different from what it will look like six months from now when we have a larger team and different customers.

How do you approach work-life balance as a leader at Finch?

Finch is cognizant that building culture can also mean giving people space to have lives outside of their job. Of course, as a 30-person company, we have to be invested in building the company from the ground up. But we are still respectful of each other’s personal commitments. Giving people the space to be flexible and to work the way they want to work is super important.

What makes Finch a great company to work for?

We are building the infrastructure that will power the future of employment data. The use cases and applicability of what we are doing are limitless and, as a result, we are addressing both tactical and massive issues for our customers. On top of that, Finch is growing at a rate where every single employee is sharing ideas and iterating to improve processes, plans, and approach. We are constantly collaborating in a way where different functional areas can improve others. One of the hallmarks of Finch is our hiring practices. We have folks from all walks of life with completely different backgrounds. By bringing this team together and focusing on how we build together, we are able to share new ideas and perspectives to turn Finch into the best company it can be.

What’s challenging about your job?

We're a startup, so there are nuances and gaps that we still have to define. This makes every day different and fresh. You don't always know where the next challenge is going to come from. We can be prescriptive and try to anticipate that, but there's always going to be an element of surprise.

What excites you about your work?

Right now we are focused on a few specific use cases – these get our foot in the door – but they only scratch the surface in terms of what our product can do. Being an integration layer between applications and payroll and HR platforms may not sound incredibly exciting, but companies in the employment space are handling extremely sensitive data in very porous ways. If we can solve this piece of the puzzle, these organizations can build better products that can help people both at work and home.

All of this is pretty exciting, especially since employers are thinking more progressively about promoting holistic workplace wellness. Employees want to feel that their company is supportive, transparent, and respectful of their values and personal priorities. We can be leaders in this space and help refine the relationship between workers and their employers.

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

Problem: Trainual, a B2B SaaS platform that helps SMBs scale their operational processes and employee training protocols, needed a way to seamlessly onboard new customers and users without endlessly building point-to-point integrations with all the HR systems in its target market’s tech stack.

Solution: With Finch, Trainual has experienced a 3,620% increase in its integration setup completion rate, making it easier for customers to invite more users to Trainual—all while reducing development costs by 75%.

Writing the playbooks for business

When businesses come to Trainual for help, they’re usually small but growing fast, and their operational processes—scattered across Google docs and PDFs—can’t keep pace. What they’re looking for is a system to document, organize, distribute, and scale the policies, roles, how-tos, hierarchies, and responsibilities that make everything run.

Trainual serves as that single source of truth. With a Trainual account, customers have access to easy-to-follow, pre-built templates and tutorials for creating their business’s unique playbook, as well as the interface they need to share that information with their staff and ensure its consumption. Trainual’s goal? To make more businesses successful and help all the people within their customers’ organization love their job and do it effectively every day.

A classic build vs. buy debate

When a business signs up for Trainual, every employee in that organization needs to be entered into the system in order to properly map the roles, responsibilities, and SOPs that make Trainual’s playbooks so effective. Every employee is also granted access to the system so that the materials developed are always at their disposal.

In order to deliver a seamless experience, Trainual knew it had to integrate with the HR and payroll systems its customers use to manage their employee records. The alternative—asking customers to manually enter or upload individual employee data—was a nonstarter.

So, Trainual began building point-to-point integrations with individual systems as the need arose. As its tech team added more integrations, the undertaking became increasingly complicated and time-consuming, leaving them with a decision to make: Should they continue their course of building one-off integrations? Should they build an API? Or should they outsource integrations to a third-party provider?

For the fast-moving startup, the decision was clear. Trainual knew that partnering with an integrations provider would allow it to meet customers' expectations in a much shorter time frame. Finch was the solution.

The impact

With Finch’s single, universal API, Trainual immediately grew its integration coverage by 137% but only had to build to one centralized point instead of many, disparate systems, saving weeks of developer time and effort. Combined with the effects of outsourcing integration maintenance to Finch, Trainual has realized a 75% reduction in development costs.

Now, Trainual has greater alignment than ever with HR and payroll systems in the SMB space, meaning more of its customers use the systems Finch connects to. In turn, Trainual has experienced a 3,620% increase in its integration setup completion rate.

Where Finch fits in

Trainual customers feel the impact of Finch in the seamlessness of their customer journey. When they’re prompted to invite additional users into the system, they’re presented with a banner of all the different integrations Trainual supports. With Finch behind the scenes providing the rails the data travels on, Trainual customers can securely transfer their company’s employee data in two simple steps:

1. Customers select their organization’s HR or payroll system from the options provided.
2. They sync their organization’s system and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch's secure, compliant, and white-labeled Connect modal.

In moments, Finch authenticates the connection and Trainual can begin importing employee data—fields like name, title, role, start date, and supervisor—to set up new user accounts.

Because the data connection is continuous, Trainual can instantly onboard and offboard new and former employees as necessary, without asking customers to update their user data. It’s critical automation for a platform that prides itself on being built to scale with customers. The ease with which new user accounts can be added has also resulted in more user accounts across the board—an important metric for Trainual.

Finch removes friction and streamlines the process of onboarding our customers and setting up new employees down to a matter of seconds. We push Finch early in our customer journey, because we know that customers who take advantage of those integrations turn into our most successful accounts.

Taylor Sell, Director of Product

Beyond onboarding

In addition to seamless onboarding, Finch empowers Trainual with the data-driven visibility to make more insightful recommendations for its customers.

Based on the data we’re able to glean from integrations—industry, company size, reporting structure, titles, tenure, etc.—we can tell customers what they should be documenting and the policies and processes they should be following. It opens up a more nuanced recommendation engine for us.

Taylor Sell, Director of Product

Continual expansion

One of the most exciting and reassuring aspects of Trainual’s relationship with Finch is the proven knowledge that Finch’s coverage is ever-expanding and won’t constrain Trainual’s own growth or ability to make a sale.

As a new request for an integration comes in from one of our customers or we see a new provider that's coming up, we've had a great experience going to the Finch team and asking, “Is this something that you have on your roadmap?” And so far, every single one we've recommended has been added within about a week. As people request it, Finch is adding integrations quickly.

Taylor Sell, Director of Product

Without the worry of building or maintaining its integrations, Trainual’s tech team has been able to move its focus away from how to get more users into the system toward the things that matter most: the training and documentation functions that constitute the core of Trainual’s product.

At Finch, we’re excited to support innovative platforms like Trainual. If you’re interested in exploring workforce data, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.

Introducing searchable API logs for an enhanced developer experience

At Finch, we know that your success depends on the information and tools you have at your disposal. As part of our commitment to supporting that success, we’re thrilled to bring searchable API requests to the Finch dashboard.

How it works

The log is a record of every API request made by your application. Some requests may be batched with associated status codes for every individual ID or payment ID, and we expand these into their own log. We record requests with singular responses as their own.

You’ll find the event log in your Finch dashboard under the Activity tab. From there, you can search by company ID, company name, request ID, individual ID, payment ID, or Finch endpoint (e.g., directory, company, payment) and filter by payroll provider, status, and time.

Developer agency is our why

In the future, the piping we’ve built will make many more features possible — like a metrics or issues center — that offer even more reliable data capture and deeper search mechanisms.

Our goal is to empower the developers building on top of Finch. With visibility into your API usage, you’ll be equipped to troubleshoot errors, keep your team apprised of their status, properly communicate issues to your external users, and provide better service.

To start building with Finch, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.

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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!

The Finch advisor and former HCM (Human Capital Management) exec shares his wishes and predictions for the industry he helped shape over the last two decades.

Two years ago, Craig Cohen left his position as general manager at ADP Marketplace for the world of e-commerce. Despite the leap, he’s still very much invested in HCM, both as a financial backer and an impassioned thought leader. He’s also a valuable member of Finch’s advisory board, who has been instrumental in helping us identify our priorities.

We recently caught up with Craig to talk about the state of HCM, including a requisite pandemic analysis and the industry change he’d most like to see.

You left ADP for WooCommerce just before the pandemic hit. Looking back, where do you think HCM was headed and how did the pandemic affect that trajectory?

It was like an asteroid hit and pushed everything in another direction. I think the big focus before the pandemic was, how do I find the best people? What incentives and wellness programs can I offer? Then the world changed. People became entrepreneurs. They realized they can work from home and start their own businesses. I think that people also lost their attachment to their employer. They really started to ask, is this the right company for me?

What's happening now is that the HCM tech base has changed. It's become much more about, how do I evolve to support and keep my people that are amazing? What can I do to make sure that they're productive and successful in the world we live in? And the last piece of that is about providing connectedness. How do we build relationships when we're not in the office together? It’s a huge shift, and the HCM ecosystem is getting bigger as a result.

It sounds like HCM has stepped up to meet the challenge. In what areas, though, is there still room for improvement?

There’s a need to make systems talk together. You don't want a situation where a user has to log in to seven different accounts to enter the same piece of information. So, I think data and data communication is the number one thing.

Do you think the need for connectivity is a given at this point, or are there players that still need to be convinced?

I think the HR people within the organization get it, and I think that the data people in the organization get it. At the same time, the C-level is worried about the top and bottom line. They haven’t seen the benefit yet. So, I think that the HR and the data information people need to have a bigger seat at the table to talk about the Great Resignation and how to get the tools and data they need to create positive experiences for employees. I think leadership needs to better understand that there is a trickle down effect that happens when you have an employee who is not satisfied with their overall experience within the organization.

What will it take to get to a place of widespread acceptance?

It’s interesting, because single sign-on has been around for a while, and everybody appreciates the instant gratification of it. We need to arm HR teams with information that shows what that impact is to the organization. The more tools and resources we can give to them, the quicker change can happen.

As you look to the future of HCM tech, what do you see?

What's happening today is you have big HCM companies—the ones that everybody knows—that took their technology from premise based to cloud based. And as their APIs continue to evolve, it allows more fields and more information to be transmitted, which creates new use cases and new opportunities for growth. So, I think it's a combination of education, like I mentioned earlier, but I also think API technology transformation needs to happen to a certain degree—to allow for new use cases that people are looking for.

You’ve talked about API maturity in the past. Why should HCM stakeholders care about API maturity?

If you think of an API as a pipe with a lot of different cords going through it, then what I mean by API maturity is that someone is making that pipe, but they're only putting 20 cords in it, when it could be 45. And if you want to go in and build out those additional cords, there are implications at various points in the pipe. That's the reason people are scared to make a lot of changes to their APIs, because it could have a significant impact on employee records. You have to be really careful. It could break an area you don't even know about. It takes a lot of testing, there's security layers on top of it, and there's a lot of things that could happen illegally, too. The result is that you have smaller companies that are more willing to take the chance to do something innovative. Then you have enterprise companies that have been around for 50 or 60 years, and they're susceptible to lawsuits, so they're a lot less willing to take the risk that comes with change.

What excites you about HCM’s future?

I believe in the HCM ecosystem; that is my biggest passion. I truly believe that companies are going to go to one HCM company less and less. At one point, the stats showed that an enterprise company touches something like 80 different sources, a mid-market company touches 40, and a small business touches 13. I believe that is going to shift up, especially as you add in wellness apps. Small businesses will touch 20 to 30. Mid-market will go to 80. As that happens, you need the data to flow. Otherwise, you're going to have to hire more people—data pushers—in the HCM space. Something like 56% of HR's manual tasks can still be automated. I think that's where Finch comes in. How do I make everything work together seamlessly, safely, and securely?

What’s your wishlist for the HCM ecosystem?

I would love to see better reporting on the back end. I know there's Tableau and others, but every one of those companies has their own reporting. As you build the ecosystem, you've got to go to this one for a report, and you have to go to that one for a report. I really think that there ought to be one place where you can grab all that data and figure out the overall impact of benefits to your company—how it impacts your turnover and hiring.

Why do you think you developed such an affinity for HCM?

As a sales leader, I spend 50% of my time hiring, onboarding and training, and the other 50% of my time retaining, which is all about motivation, inspiration, leadership, and coaching. These things impact me every day, and the HCM space touches all of that.

Which begs the questions, why did you decide to go into e-commerce?

My career in HCM was about the employee experience and how it impacted people's everyday lives. I saw a correlation between that and my work now, which is about impacting the buyer's life. If I can create a great experience for a mom-and-pop shop, a mid-market shop, or even an enterprise shop to give a great customer experience, so that people aren’t always buying through Amazon, then I have succeeded.

Learn more about HCM connectivity solutions.

To start building with Finch, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.

Job searches and exploratory calls are daunting, and we get it! All of us have been there at some point—and trust us, it’s not any easier on our side. From filling out the application to conducting research and negotiation, it’s a delicate balance between art and science.  

To reduce the uncertainty that only adds to the stress, Finch is committed to a policy of hiring transparency. Here's what you can expect from us:

• Clear expectation-setting during the first phone call.
• Updates within 48 hours after each interview.
• No take-home challenge. We believe collaboration and conversations drive us forward and would rather spend our time talking through ideas together.

All we ask is that you come prepared to share your experiences, express your thoughts, and just be yourself! At the end of the process, you'll have a good sense of life at Finch. Ready to build with us?    

Why Finch?

Product

Finch’s API helps refine the relationship between employers and employees by unlocking access to employment data across many closed systems: payroll, benefits administration, equity management, and more. Starting with payroll and HRIS (5,700+ systems) we’re already powering applications that help thousands of employers improve pay equity, provide access to mental health benefits, measure the ecological impact of their organization, and much more.

Team

Finch is a remote-first company. Our team members are located across the United States and Canada. We stay connected as a team by collaborating in our virtual office and gathering for local meet-ups and company offsites. Visit our BuiltIn page to learn more about our culture and how you can make an impact. We’re passionate about our company values of execution, curiosity, humility, and empathy.

Perks

We care about every individual’s well-being and work-life balance Benefits and perks matter! Some of our benefits include health insurance, paid family leave, flexible vacation time, wellness stipend, and more.

Our Interview Process

Finch follows a standardized interview process and evaluation system to reduce the impact of unconscious bias.

Application Review

Browse through our open roles and submit your resume. If you don’t see a role that’s a fit for you, email us at recruiting@tryfinch.com. We’ll reply shortly.

Pro Tip: First impressions matter! Double-check for accuracy and grammatical errors. Saving documents as PDFs help preserve your original formatting. We want to hear about your career growth and how you’ve led changes in your previous roles. Uploading supporting documents is helpful but not required.    

Introduction Call

You’ve made it to the intro call! We’ll take this time to learn more about each other and review logistics. Please ask questions about Finch! If there’s a mutual fit, we’ll reach out to schedule a second-round interview.

Second Round Interview

Our hiring manager will dig into your professional history, the high and low points of your roles, and your motivations. They’ll ask you to talk about the specifics of your last few roles in depth.

Pro Tip: Come prepared to talk about a complex project you’ve worked on. It should be related to the role you’re applying for. You will be asked to break down the project in detail, your responsibilities, challenges you faced, and lessons you learned for future improvement.

Virtual Onsite

You’ve made it to the final interviews, and all of us are rooting for you! Our onsite process usually has three to four interviews. You’ll be speaking with peers and managers across the company. We’ll share additional details over the phone beforehand.

Reference Check

After the onsite, we’ll reflect on your journey. Our offers are contingent on successful reference checks. Please have three professional references ready (peer + managers) who have worked with you in the past. We’ll discuss their experiences working with you, your ability to collaborate, and your ability to navigate through ambiguous situations.

Offer

Congratulations, we are excited to grow with you! The Finch team is open to providing additional advice and insight. Ultimately, we hope that you’ll make the decision that’s right for you.

General Tips

• Preparation is key for any successful interview. We encourage you to review the job description and check out our careers website for details on our values and workplace experience.
• Review the role and responsibilities.
• Review our business or engineering interview guides.
• Check out our doc center and explore our demo.
• Meet the Team!
• Don’t be humble: We love team players, but in interviews, we want to hear about your accomplishments. The interview is the best time to brag about yourself, and we would much rather hear “I” than “we.” Talk about your individual numbers, achievements, promotions, etc.
• Provide examples: We want to hear specific examples of your strengths and areas that you are working on improving. Failures provide important learning opportunities and show that you are looking to grow outside of your comfort zone.
• Introspection: When interviewing virtually, it can be difficult to read body language and gauge the room. To combat this, we recommend asking clarifying questions followed by, “Did that answer your question, or is there anything I can elaborate on?”

Your recruiter and hiring manager will be key partners. Leverage them to set yourself up for success. Email recruiting@tryfinch.com if you have questions!

Next up in our Employee Spotlight series is developer success lead Eddie Hou, who’s always ready with a creative solution.

Eddie Hou likes people. He likes talking to them, getting them to open up, and figuring out what makes them tick. He’s also an engineer by trade and a problem-solver by passion. That combination of skills makes him perfectly suited for his role at Finch, which requires thoughtful communication, technical trouble-shooting, and reading between the lines to get to the core of any issues that arise. We recently spoke with Eddie to learn more.

To start, can you tell us about your role?

I lead the Developer Success function here at Finch. It’s a technical client-facing, post-sales role that requires being quick on my feet and having in-depth knowledge of the product. To put it simply, I'm a technical resource for our customers. It’s my job to set them up for success right from the start. This actually entails a complicated set of responsibilities, because the challenges that we’re tackling are unknown-unknown types of problems. We are constantly trying to define success and answer tough questions: How do we get customers to continue using our product? What type of problems are they facing? We're working with so many different verticals and personalities, the answers vary from customer to customer, and how we prioritize those wants into our roadmap is very complex.

That sounds like it requires a unique skill set. What did you study in school?

I majored in Electrical and Computer Engineering and added an engineering business minor. I’ve always been interested in commerce and business but my dad encouraged me to study something technical. He would say, "You'll always have a job [as an engineer], and you can always transition to business, but you can't become an engineer if you only have a business degree." I thought that made sense.

What did you do prior to Finch?

I worked at another startup called Moveworks as the first customer success engineer and I helped build the team there. Over the course of that process, we went from a series A company with one or two customers to a series C company with more than 150 customers. Moveworks was valued at $2.1 billion when I left. Once I was done building out processes, my day-to-day became slightly redundant and a bit too structured for me.

What did you take away from that experience?

I think my experience at Moveworks shaped who I am today. It showed me what it took for a startup to succeed and the people that I worked with side by side really made the 12-hour days feel worth it. The group of people that were part of the original cohort were extremely talented and dedicated people, especially my mentors, Gwen and Ahmed. I learned from them every single day - both the skills and the mindset to persevere and push through difficult times and problems. I’ll cherish those memories for the rest of my life.

How did you hear about the opportunity at Finch?

A recruiter reached out to me and that led to a couple of informal conversations with Jeremy and Ansel [Finch’s co-founders]. We spoke about the types of problems that they’re facing and how they’re thinking about the future of this particular space. I was instantly interested in learning more about the team. I think the team determines whether a company's going to succeed more so than the idea itself and I really liked the team.

What was your impression of the team?

I’m a people person yet very analytical so the conversations were interesting, to say the least. It was clear that others at Finch were mission-driven and passionate. They also demonstrated a high level of ownership over whatever they're working on. The reality at Finch is what I expected during my initial interactions: everyone's committed, passionate to create a change, and they're able to push through when things feel challenging.

When do things feel challenging?

Things feel challenging when you’re in the thick of everything. It’s easy to get caught in the weeds of problem solving and lose track of the impact that we’re creating. However, when you zoom out and look at our progress over a month or a year, for instance, it’s significant. It’s rewarding when we acknowledge, "Wow, we increased our customer base by 40% in the last quarter." Those numbers are only reserved for the best-in-class companies and we’re already seeing these results as a 20 people startup.

What do you like most about your job?

I like creating solutions for complex problems. It’s really satisfying when my engineering background comes in handy! I also love building relationships with customers throughout their entire journey. Internally, my co-workers are great to work with and I enjoy watching the company grow. We’ll share stories and learn from one another. These moments will be the ones that we reminisce about a year or two from now.

What do you like best about working at Finch?

Finch has a lot of great qualities; I’ll share three. First is the ability to lean in and contribute to business decisions. Every start-up would say that individual team members have the opportunity to make a huge impact within the company. In my experience, that isn’t always true. Second, there’s a constant feedback loop. Everyone is open to it and we take it very seriously. We have healthy and constructive debates where folks don't get defensive. Lastly, there’s a much better work/life balance compared to my other experiences — by far. Ansel and Jeremy care about people, and they want them to stay for the long haul.

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

Growing up in the small town of Rosseau, Ontario, Aren Patel never imagined he’d wind up in California working at some of the most innovative companies in the world. His college internship turned into a full-time gig at Google, and now he’s a full-fledged Bay Area engineer working to unlock access to the global employment ecosystem. Recently, we caught up with Aren to talk about his experience.

You returned to the startup world after a long hiatus. What’s the story there?

I graduated from the University of Waterloo with an electrical engineering degree. During my final semester, I joined BufferBox, a four-person startup founded by a hockey friend of mine. The concept was like Amazon Locker, but any e-retailer could ship to their kiosks, which were located in stations throughout Toronto’s GO Transit system. I was responsible for the design and development of all of BufferBox’s web services and APIs, which was an exciting amount of responsibility for someone fresh out of college. And then, while I was working there, the company got acquired by Google.

Your career at Google lasted for nearly a decade. What projects did you work on?

I worked at Google Shopping for a bit before transferring to Nest. There, I led the team responsible for building the Nest to Google account migration on Nest's login pages, and I served as the technology lead on the team that built Nest’s MyAccount data export tool. After five years with Nest, I took a position on the Orion Wi-Fi team at Google's R&D incubator, Area 120, where I developed Angular (Dart and TypeScript) web apps. After two years at Area 120, I got my green card, giving me permanent residency in the States. At that point, I was ready to join a smaller company, so I took the opportunity to reenter the startup ecosystem.

Why did you want to go back to a startup?

I like small teams and making genuine connections. Like most people, I spend a good chunk of my life at work, so building relationships while I’m there is important to me. To put things in perspective, when I started at Google, there were around 30,000 or 40,000 employees. By the time I left, there were 200,000+ employees worldwide. The dynamics are very different when you’re working with a lean team of 16, like I currently am at Finch, versus a global population of 200,000.

What made you decide that Finch was the right move?

I engaged with hundreds of companies during my search. Finch stood out to me for two reasons. The first one is the types of problems that Finch is tackling. It was a natural fit between my prior experiences at Google and BufferBox and what the team at Finch was looking for. The second is the people. After meeting Jeremy and Ansel [Finch’s founders], I was impressed with the environment they had cultivated. Throughout the interview process, they were open, honest, and willing to share. It’s safe to say that these qualities are embodied by everyone at Finch.

How was your work at Google similar to your work at Finch?

When I was at Nest, we focused on making the thermostat, smoke alarm, and camera products more open, so developers can build complementary products on top of them. Finch is doing something similar but for employer data. Our API makes it easy and secure to read and write data to any employee system, so forward-thinking companies can build innovative products on top of those systems.

Describe your role at Finch.

My title is founding engineer. Day-to-day, I am responsible for a lot of software engineering-related activities: figuring out what we're building, reviewing design docs, scoping projects. I'm a full-stack engineer, so I work on the front-end, the back-end, and everything in between. Any piece of code we have, I'm touching or changing. Just like a lot of traditional software engineering roles, I cover a wide range of responsibilities.

What excites you about your job?

The employment sector is old and stagnant, which only means that the opportunities to improve and automate processes are countless. Unlocking employee data is definitely going to be a game-changer for all industries. As a software engineer, it’s always exciting to see growth in the product that you’re working on and the impact of all of your efforts.

You also take an active role in the hiring process at Finch. What do you look for in a potential new hire?

I am always on the lookout for genuine enthusiasm for our product and our mission. Creativity is key as well. Thinking outside the box and coming up with novel ideas and solutions is essential to success at a startup like Finch. I am also interested in people who are willing to learn. They don’t have to be an expert in every subject, but they do need to catch on to new skills and information quickly and then be able to apply those learnings proactively.

How do you feel about Finch’s asynchronous work model?

It has been super helpful for me. My fiancée is a nurse, and she works crazy hours in the ER, so I tend to work around her schedule. Finch is really accommodating to that. There are no set hours; as long as you’re getting your tasks done and attending the meetings you agreed to, you’re good.

How do you get to know your colleagues if you are all working remotely and asynchronously?

At Finch, we all find ways to connect with each other–inside and outside of our remote setting. But on a day-to-day basis, one of our most effective tools is Gather, a virtual office space that we use to collaborate and stay engaged. It has been instrumental in helping me get to know everyone at Finch.

The layout of Gather is similar to the Sims game. We customize our office space, personalize our avatars, choose a desk, and chat with each other in real time. I can walk up to anyone at their desk and start a conversation like I would in a physical office, only it’s video. It has made approaching people much easier.

Here is my desk and our conference room!

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

You might say Sam Toffler is a puzzle fanatic. Give him a riddle to solve or a logic problem to work through, and his mind won’t rest until he does (just ask his girlfriend). It’s an affinity that led him to study computer science, then to a job at Amazon Web Services, and, ultimately, to Finch. Recently, we caught up with Sam to talk about his engineering career, his next road trip, and the satisfaction that comes when something finally “clicks.”

Where are you from and how did it lead you here?

I was born and raised in South Florida and went to a really competitive high school. I think that shaped my work ethic, honestly. And it brought me to Duke, where I majored in computer science.

How did you choose your major?

I took comp-sci 101 in my first semester and it was instantaneous love. The course was basically solving puzzles and riddles, which I’ve always been obsessed with.

What did you do after college?

I took a summer off, and then I started working at Amazon Web Services on a team called Fargate. I was a software engineer there for two and a half years.

Tell us about Fargate.

Fargate is in the serverless space. I worked primarily on what we called region builds–so, expanding the service to different Amazon data centers throughout the world. For context, Amazon is present in approximately 20 locations. When Fargate launched, it was only in one location. When I joined, it was in eight, and by the time I left, it was deployed to all AWS regions.

Why did you decide to look for another opportunity?

One of the big reasons I left Amazon is because of how little coding I was doing–which some people find surprising. It was also extremely slow paced. Even a single line change could take a full week to deploy. That gets frustrating after a while. So, I was looking for an opportunity to code more, move faster, and have a larger impact on the team. That’s when I started thinking about startups.

What was it about Finch, in particular, that appealed to you?

I really liked what Finch is doing. It's a really valuable product that’s ripe for explosion. Coming from Amazon, I was a little nervous about going somewhere small, but I realized that I am at a point in my life where I can afford to take a chance and do something outside my comfort zone. And I am really happy that I did.

What does the day in the life of a Finch founding engineer look like?

Thankfully, it’s a lot of coding. I would say 60 to 70% of my time is coding–maybe not hands-on-keyboard, but I am at least thinking about my own code that often. The rest of my time is spent reviewing other people's code, conducting technical interviews for job applicants, and attending assorted meetings like sprint planning sessions and sprint retrospectives.

What is it about coding that you’re so fond of?

I think it’s the balancing act between form and function. There are a million ways you can code something, but, at the end of the day, you want to make your code as clear and concise as possible. To me, there's a lot of enjoyment in trying to make it perfect, so that people who read my code understand exactly what it is I was trying to do. The same thing happens to me when I’m writing an email or, in the past, when I took creative writing classes. It’s like trying to figure out the ideal way to craft a sentence or a paragraph. When I find the best way to say what’s in my head, it’s very satisfying.

What have you learned since starting at Finch?

I’ve learned to take more ownership. There's a lot of opportunity at Finch for my voice to be heard, and having strong convictions goes a long way because if I can make a case for what I want, people will give me the room to do it. But it’s also more than that. If I start something in one area of the company, it might spread. That’s what I find really fulfilling: when I can see the impact of what I’m contributing, and I get positive feedback that what I’m doing is beneficial.

What do you like most about working at Finch?

The people. Everybody is super friendly, smart, and respectful. When we had our in-person offsite last year in October, it was the first time I had met any of my coworkers in real life, and it felt like a weekend with close friends. We all stayed in a house in L.A., and we got along so well. I am really excited for our next one just because of how good of a time we had.

Describe Finch in one word.

Fast-paced. We're getting so many new customers, and all of our new customers want new things, and we're always getting new team members. The nature of everything is really quick, which I like.

How do you spend your time outside of work?

My girlfriend and I got a puppy over the summer. So, that's been taking up a lot of our time. I also enjoy skiing. We're actually taking a month-long skiing road trip to Salt Lake City, Park City, Alta, Snowbird, Aspen, Beaver Creek, and maybe Sun Valley. I would say golfing, reading, chess, and video games round out my downtime interests.

What are you passionate about?

The feeling of learning something and having it click. I'll give you an example. Recently, I changed my keyboard from a standard Qwerty layout, because I had read that you can make your keyboard more ergonomic and efficient by putting more popular letters closer to your pointer and middle fingers. That required relearning where all the keys are, which took practice–about 20 minutes a day for two weeks. When I got to the point that I could type 40 words per minute, I made the switch full time. Now, I type just as fast as I did on a Qwerty. The whole thing was really rewarding for me, because it was an opportunity to scratch that itch of getting good at something new.

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

The employment landscape is undergoing dramatic changes, and data integrations are crucial to keeping pace. But maintaining them in-house is a drain on your resources and a distraction from your core competencies. Here’s what to do instead.

Not so long ago, it seemed like all it took to earn a reputation for a great work environment was a few ping pong tables, some quirky seating arrangements, and a gourmet cafeteria. Then COVID-19 happened and the story changed dramatically.

Now, old standards have given way to new expectations about what it means to provide an exceptional workplace. For employee engagement platforms, it has been a clarion call, prompting innovative players to build next-generation platforms that solve the challenges employers face today and are predicted to face going forward.

One aspect of great platform design is integrations. They are foundational to best-in-class functionality and user experience, but not all approaches to integrations are created equal. In this blog post, we’ll cover how to approach integrations more efficiently and effectively, so you have greater bandwidth to focus on your platform’s core technologies and deliver a superior experience to your customers and their employees alike.

But first, let’s talk landscape

To understand how and why integrations are so important, we have to consider the current state of affairs. It likely goes without saying that COVID-19 and the concurrent social and political movements of the past few years have seismically changed aspects of our collective work life in ways that fundamentally impact how employers approach people management and employee engagement. Some of the most important include:

A shift in the power balance

We would be remiss not to mention what you probably already know: workers are quitting and switching jobs at record rates, or leaving the workforce entirely, and there are now more available jobs than there is talent to fill them. Experts don’t expect the tide to change anytime soon. While many employers are responding to the pressures by offering higher salaries and wages to new hires, an effective, longer-term strategy may be investing in a “sticky” workplace culture—one marked by regular, effective communication—that promotes employee retention.

The rise of remote and hybrid work models

Office closure mandates at the onset of the pandemic forced many employers to allow employees to work from home, and it seems employees have come to favor the arrangement. According to recent polls, 45% of full-time U.S. employees continue to work remotely all or some of the time, including 67% of office workers. Of them, 91% would like to work at least some of the time from home even after the pandemic fully subsides, with 30% disclosing that they are extremely likely to seek a different job if they lose their option to work remotely.

Another factor to consider is that remote and hybrid work models can mean fewer friends in the workplace, which can lead to weaker emotional ties and less social pressure to stay with a company. Moreover, without any geographical constraints, remote workers have a wider pool of employers and job opportunities to choose from, making it easier to find alternative work. As a consequence, employers who don’t develop viable solutions to manage, engage, and build connections among remote talent not only risk operational inefficiencies, they also risk losing valuable employees.

Higher DEI standards

As activists continue to bring renewed and revolutionary attention to issues of racial and gender justice, employers are being called on to look critically at their own diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and execute proactive, ongoing plans to remedy their gaps and shortcomings. Many, it seems, are heeding the call. A recent analysis of S&P 500 earnings calls found that CEOs have discussed DEI 658% more frequently since 2018, and 40% of organizations report having hired a DEI specialist, the majority of which were added to their rosters in the past year and a half. As a result, DEI initiatives will naturally extend to employee engagement strategies, including measures like surveying employees on DEI issues, tracking and analyzing measures of workplace diversity, and instituting inclusive career growth paths and coaching opportunities to ensure everyone has the same access to success.

An emphasis on mental wellness

The collective and individual trauma and stress employees have experienced in recent years has had a toll on their mental health, making it more clear than ever that employers can no longer afford, from an ethical or financial standpoint, to ignore the overall wellbeing of their workforce. As talking about and seeking help for mental health challenges becomes increasingly normalized, especially among younger generations of workers, employers are increasingly expected to not only provide resources and benefits to support employees in crisis but also cultivate an environment that supports employee mental health. According to one study, employers (and the employee engagement platforms that serve them) would be wise to focus on reducing job boredom and monotony, supporting employees’ work-life balance, improving workplace communication practices, and fostering connections and networks of support among colleagues and managers.

These trends and others have led thought leaders to call for a large-scale humanization of the workplace. Now more than ever, employers should create opportunities and leverage technology to drive connections, inspire creativity, and help individual workers achieve their potential.

The role (and challenges) of integrations in employee engagement

Clearly, this new world order presents a litany of challenges for employers, and employee engagement platforms are working to deliver best-in-class solutions and experiences that address those pain points.

For many employee engagement platforms, this includes integrating with employers’ HR and payroll systems (e.g., Workday, ADP, etc.) to automate data connectivity and unify data across disparate sources as a means of reducing friction and optimizing the performance of their product.

But integrations are not without challenges, especially if you choose to build them in-house. For starters:

They’re expensive

It takes many engineering hours to build one integration, let alone the dozens or hundreds required to connect with systems in highly fragmented markets like HR and payroll software, where some 5,700+ systems have shares (check out our whitepaper on the landscape here). When you consider the average salary of an in-house developer, you’re looking at an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, excluding the considerable and ongoing expense of maintaining integrations over time (a full-time job unto itself).

They’re a distraction

All that time spent on integrations is time your team isn’t spending on your core technology—a huge opportunity cost. How much more could you accomplish and how much faster could you get to market if your team’s attention wasn’t split between your product and the ancillary technologies that support it?

They’re hard to do really well

If integrations aren’t in your team’s wheelhouse, your integrations are likely not functioning as well as they could be. That’s because different data sources have different data models, and each source value has to be mapped to a target data field to make it operable for your system. The more source values you’re working with, the more complicated things get, and if mapping is not done correctly, it can end up requiring a lot of manual intervention to make right.

Then there’s the issue of data enrichment. It takes a specialist to add value to the data you retrieve and make it optimally usable and actionable for your particular use case. In other words, it’s likely that the data you’re accessing via in-house builds isn’t reaching its potential.

Outsourcing your platform’s integrations enables you to take advantage of all the benefits while avoiding these common challenges.

One API, dozens (and dozens) of integrations

Innovative employee engagement platforms looking to build best-in-class experiences and get to market faster turn to Finch—the only integration partner focused on HR and payroll systems via the employer access point.

Finch works via a single, universal API that offers 360° integrations with an ever-growing network of HR and payroll systems (125 at the time of publication), so you can cover more of your addressable market than ever before.

By building your platform on the Finch API, your customers can authorize you to retrieve data from their payroll and HR systems in just a few clicks. Here’s how it works:

• Finch Connect (our secure front-end module) prompts your customers to choose their payroll or HR system.
• Your customers authenticate their account and authorize a set of permissions by entering their admin credentials to that system.
• The connection is established, and you start retrieving data.

That’s it. With Finch, what was once a 30-day process of tedious CSV file uploads, phone calls, and back-and-forth between your support team and your customers is reduced to 30 seamless seconds.

From there, you have access to your customers’ entire employee roster and dozens of data attributes per worker (e.g., hire date, job title, work and home location), allowing your customers to start using your platform immediately.

Not only does that save you time and improve your lead conversion rates, it’s a selling point to customers, who can be easily deterred by a drawn-out onboarding process.

And because the data connection is continuous, your platform is automatically apprised of new hires and other changes in end-user work status. In turn, your platform also makes onboarding and offboarding your customers’ employees easier, faster, and more automated. That can pay dividends for your customers, as studies show that strong onboarding processes improve employee retention by 82 percent.

Additional benefits

The advantages of using Finch don’t stop there:

• We standardize data across our entire coverage network and output it in a unified format for optimal usability, saving you from the hassle of having to worry about the intricacies of your customers’ (many) HR and payroll systems.
• Our API is dynamic and built to scale, which means we can respond swiftly to new edge case systems and unlock support in as little as two weeks, ensuring you never lose a sale because of lack of coverage.
• Finch is designed for large-scale synchronization with tens of thousands of employers. We surface large quantities of sensitive information reliably and securely (check out our Security page for more information).

Last but not least, we handle all upkeep and maintenance of your integrations, so your team can focus on what you do best—helping employers cultivate engaging, connected, and productive workplaces, no matter what the world throws their way.

Want to know more about integrations for employee engagement platforms?

Click the black Request Access button in the upper-right of this webpage to submit a question or ask to see our API documentation.

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.

By not dividing your team’s attention between your core product and the ancillary technologies that support it, you can build smarter, get to market faster, and create an exceptional experience for your customers.

As an innovative retirement benefits provider, you already know that the retirement benefits industry has room for improvement. Legacy business models and outdated management systems are prevalent and prohibitive–serving as barriers, in many cases, to employer and employee adoption.

Consider the numbers. Some 68% of private-sector workers have access to retirement benefits through their employer, and, of them, 51% elect to participate. At first blush, the data doesn’t seem half bad. However, it belies the fact that more than 38 million workers aren’t being offered retirement benefits at all, and 40 million more aren’t opting in for one reason or another. Meanwhile, among those who do participate in a retirement plan, more than half are behind on their retirement strategies, either because they aren’t contributing enough or they’re raiding their plans in times of emergency.

This statistic also obscures the reality that access to retirement benefits is far from inclusive. In service industries, for example, workers with employer-sponsored plans drops to 40%, and in some verticals, like restaurants, it’s as low as 18%.

Clearly, something’s not working as it should. When you couple that with employers’ struggle to attract and retain employees and the challenges of remote and hybrid work models, the need for viable HR technology solutions in the retirement benefits space is apparent.

A product-led approach

While there’s no one solution that will address every issue, focusing your efforts on building a best-in-class platform for your customers is a great place to start. The reason? HR professionals are overwhelmed by the tedious transactional tasks associated with retirement benefits management and consider it one of their most pressing challenges. That makes retirement benefits ripe for digital disruption. In fact, HR leaders are more likely to realize benefits from HR technology when it’s applied to benefits administration than any other HR function.

Staying ahead of the pack is another reason. Whether you choose to optimize your retirement benefits platform or not, your competitors certainly will. The HR tech market is booming, and that means next-generation benefits solutions–with best-in-class platforms–are regularly hitting the market.

Synced is superior

At its core, a best-in-class retirement benefits platform is a connected one, meaning it can exchange information with employers’ HR and payroll systems (e.g., Paychex, ADP RUN, Gusto), for a highly synced, coordinated, and automated benefits management experience.

From onboarding and enrollment to deduction management and compliance reporting, a well-connected platform–one with sophisticated software integrations–minimizes friction at every step of the benefits lifecycle, alleviating your customers of their benefits management burdens and making engagement with your platform an enjoyable and reliable experience. In turn, you realize higher employee participation and contributions.

In-house inefficiencies

Chances are, this is not new information to you. You’re probably building or already have built integrations with market-leading HR and payroll systems. At the same time, you’ve probably experienced one or more of these common headaches along the way:

• Maintenance difficulties
  No matter how successful your initial build-out, integrations are bound to break at some point, whether due to a system change on your end or the data source’s. Staying on top of and solving for these changes is a full-time job that your team doesn’t have the bandwidth to handle in a reasonable timeframe –  they’re too busy focusing on your core product. Ultimately, it’s your customers’ experience that suffers.
• Ongoing costs
  In addition to taxing your team’s time, integrations come with a heavy price tag when you consider the average salary of your employees and the hours they spend building and maintaining your connections. In some cases, an initial build-out can cost $300,000 or more, not including upkeep. There are also opportunity costs to consider; how much more could you accomplish and how much faster could you get to market if your team’s attention wasn’t split between your product and the ancillary technologies that support it?
• Suboptimal performance
  Then there’s functionality. The more integrations you build, the more difficult it becomes to get them to work optimally for your purposes. That’s because disparate data sources have different data models, and each source value has to be mapped to a target data field to make it operable for your system. The more source values you’re working with, the more complicated things get. If mapping is not done correctly, it can end up requiring a lot of manual interventions. What’s more, unless you have an integrations specialist on staff, it’s unlikely that your team has the niche expertise to optimally enrich the data you retrieve for your particular use case. In other words, the data you’re accessing isn’t reaching its potential.

Outsourced and optimized

So, how do you leverage the very best of system integrations and all the benefits they offer your customers while avoiding the pitfalls that come with in-house build outs and maintenance? The answer is outsourcing.

In a fragmented industry with 5,700+ employment systems, outsourcing your integrations saves time and money. Instead of building integrations with dozens of payroll systems yourself, an integration partner does the work for you, while also providing ongoing support and maintenance. This outsourced infrastructure lets your team focus on fine-tuning your product, executing your roadmap, and creating the best user experience possible.

That said, the right integration partner won’t just relieve you of headaches; they will add extraordinary value to your platform. For that, you need a use case specialist.

Benefits specialists > data generalists

Say hello to Finch, the only integration platform solely focused on connecting applications to their employer clients’ payroll and HR systems. This means all of our efforts are spent optimizing and scaling integrations to cover all the edge cases relevant to your business.

Finch offers a unified API with 360° integrations into an ever-growing list of HR and payroll systems (125 at the time of publication). In this context, 360° means  read and write access, so you can pull census and pay statement information as well as push payroll deductions depending on employee contributions. Since Finch abstracts away inconsistencies across systems, all these actions can be accessed through a single set of endpoints.

Aside from streamlining technical workflows, Finch offers high-touch support, ensuring any issues are dealt with swiftly and, most importantly, without intervention from your team.

From 30 days to 30 seconds

Perhaps the most immediate benefit of Finch is the hyper-streamlined onboarding it enables. With Finch, it only takes a moment for customers to authorize you to retrieve and send data from and to their payroll and HR systems. Here’s how:

• Finch Connect (our secure front-end modal) prompts your customers to choose their payroll or HR system.
• Your customers authenticate their account and authorize a set of permissions by entering their admin or API credentials to that system.
• The connection is established, and you start reading and writing data.

That’s all it takes. In seconds, you have what you need to begin enrolling employees in retirement plans and managing their payroll deductions.

Automated onboarding and compliance

Once you’re connected, you can access live census data to streamline onboarding and offboarding of eligible employees. From day one (or the first day they can participate), you’ll have their key contact information, location, and worker status to ensure they can start contributing to their retirement as soon as possible. Similarly, when someone is no longer employed or eligible, you can offboard them from the system automatically and transition their account to a non-employee access so they can still manage the plans they do have.

For retirement benefits applications that also act as recordkeepers, you can access current and historical pay statement details down to the line item to ensure proper tracking of all contributions (pre and post-tax), enrollments, and TINs required to comply with IRS regulations.

End-to-end deductions management

Now that employees are onboarded, you’ll want to make sure they start contributing to their retirement goals with their first paycheck. You’ll need to create benefits, enroll participants, and make changes directly in payroll as their retirement savings plans shift.

Using Finch’s Benefits endpoint, you can create benefits (pre-tax, post-tax, recurring, one-time deductions), enroll individuals to one or many benefits, and select their $ or % contributions with employer matches where applicable. Throughout this whole process, the sponsor’s HR admin doesn’t have to lift a finger to upload deduction files or manually enter changes. That can amount to hours per month saved and dozens of potential human errors avoided.

Onward and upward

Best of all, Finch is dynamic, responsive, and built to scale.

For new edge case systems that come up in customer conversations, Finch can unlock support in as little as two weeks. That means, on the off chance you’re trying to land a customer that uses a system not yet covered by Finch, we have a gameplan to expand coverage so you don’t lose a sale.

Finch is also designed for large-scale synchronization with tens of thousands of employers, from small startups to massive public companies. Our team has accumulated expertise in constructing mission-critical infrastructure over many years, enabling us to surface large quantities of sensitive information reliably and securely.

Want to know more about integrations for retirement benefits?

Click the black Request Access button in the upper-right of this webpage to submit a question or ask to see our API documentation.

Health and wellness benefits in the United States are at an inflection point. And if you’re a health and wellness benefits provider, that puts you in a favorable position.

The reason? Converging factors have prompted many employers to reconsider their approach to benefits–not only to entice great employees but to help existing employees stay healthy and productive. Among them:

• Changing expectations around the types of benefits employers should provide
• “The Great Resignation” and the unique bargaining power it has afforded workers
• The prioritization of core health benefits, mental health benefits, and telehealth benefits in light of the COVID-19 pandemic

Meanwhile, employers also continue to face old problems like outdated benefits management systems, costly and time-consuming manual processes, and health benefit underutilization.

To gain traction and earn market share, emerging and established health benefits providers can use integrations with payroll and HR systems to create best-in-class health and wellness benefit experiences that help employers meet their complex needs and mitigate some of their most pressing issues.

A trend toward technology

A review of employers’ attitudes around benefits technology suggests that the time is ripe for integrations.

Studies show that employers are demonstrating an increased willingness to pay for digital initiatives. According to a recent survey, spending on HR and benefits technology grew 15% between 2017 and 2021, with 70% of employers reporting a renewed focus on benefits technology following the pandemic.

Reports also suggest employers are intrigued by the power of data and how it can help them optimize their HR functions. In fact, 76% indicated they would consider sharing basic employee information with insurance providers in order to create more personalized, tailored health benefits experiences for their workers.

Integrations for the win

With employers receptive to data’s potential and poised to pursue new benefit technologies, health benefits providers would be smart to use integrations to help address some of employers’ most pressing wants and needs.

Here are just some of the ways that integrations can serve your customers:

1. Automated enrollment and benefits management

Historically, processes like benefits enrollment and payroll deduction changes have been time- and labor-intensive for both employers and employees. With integrations, enrolling an employee in any benefit takes just a few clicks–no manual paperwork required!

Integrations also allow you to push information to payroll and HR systems, making tasks like payroll deduction changes practically friction-free. In short, manual tasks that once took days or weeks and a lot of effort can now happen in minutes.

2. Higher benefit utilization

Ask almost any employer and they will say achieving high utilization rates for key health benefits like health insurance, HSAs, FSAs, and employee assistance programs (EAPs) is a struggle. Studies suggesting that one in three workers would rather talk about their weight than their employee benefits and others that show average EAP utilization does not exceed 10% support their anecdotal claims. Workers not taking advantage of the benefits they’re entitled to might put them at increased risk for worse health outcomes and financial hardship. For employers, underutilization can mean higher premiums and tax bills.

Part of the problem seems to be that many legacy benefits systems were not designed with user experience in mind. If a system is difficult for HR teams and workers to navigate or unpleasant to engage with, utilization will suffer. Benefits education is another issue, with 68% of employers calling it “a challenge,” and 37% believing that employees don’t understand the value of benefits well enough to justify the cost.

Innovative benefits providers know that integrations are a key component of good product design. By making it simple and seamless to onboard new employers and manage workers’ benefits (i.e., no more CSV files), integrations contribute to an all-around better user experience, which can help employers realize improved utilization rates, healthier and happier employees, and cost savings.

Take HSAs as an example. Because integrations make it easy for HR teams to enroll an employee in an HSA and manage their HSA payroll deductions, more employees are likely to take advantage. In turn, employers can realize lower HDHP premiums and lower FICA taxes.

3. More insights and personalization

From their social media feeds, to their Netflix recommendations, to their subscription cosmetic boxes, Millennial and Gen Z consumers are accustomed to being catered to with highly personalized experiences, and they’re bringing those expectations with them to the labor force. In response, employers are looking for ways to offer more tailored health benefit experiences to their employees, and they are willing to trade data to get there.

Integrations allow that exchange of data to happen securely, seamlessly, continuously, and in real time, so innovative health benefits providers can build the next generation of custom benefits experiences. As a bonus, integrations can also provide benefits providers with granular visibility into how benefits are being used (or not) across customers and systems, making possible data-substantiated strategies for improving engagement and utilization.

4. Better benefits packages

Offering attractive benefits is a research-backed strategy for finding and retaining talent. At a time when there are nearly 11 million U.S. job vacancies and workers are quitting jobs in droves, employers are starting to evaluate the benefits they offer and look for ways to improve. In today’s climate, that means offering things like mental health assistance and telemedicine services but also focusing on the quality of core health benefits like insurance, HSAs, and FSAs.

This is especially critical in a country like the United States, where employer-sponsored health insurance is not a given. In fact, among businesses with 10 to 24 employees, only 52% offer health insurance. In the case of businesses with fewer than 10 employees, that number drops to 23%.

By automating countless health benefits tasks and processes, integrations free up time and help employers reduce administrative costs, making it possible for employers to offer more and better benefits to their workers. This is especially true for small businesses, who generally don’t have the bandwidth to manage traditional HR packages in house. Consequently, if a benefits provider makes it easy (with the help of integrations), offering health insurance can suddenly become feasible. And with 46% of workers saying health insurance strongly influenced their decision to accept a job, the ROI to employers is practically assured.

5. Employee retention

Integrations can also aid in worker retention. In fact, 56% of workers reported that the quality of their employer-sponsored health coverage is a key factor in their decision to stay at their job.

However, there might be something else at play as well. By automating tasks that were once the purview of internal benefits administrators, HR teams have more time to allocate to the human side of human resources–that is, helping individual employees not only understand and engage with their benefits but also develop professionally and grow in their careers. In turn, employees are more likely to feel seen and valued, and that can be reason enough for anyone to stay put.

The build vs. buy debate

In summary, integrations are essential to building industry-leading benefits products and services for your customers and their employees. But being responsible for your own integrations is a mammoth undertaking. The payroll and HR management systems industry is so fragmented (5,700+ providers - read our whitepaper here) that you would need to build and maintain dozens (if not hundreds) of integrations just to cover your total addressable market–not to mention, figure out how to properly scrub and standardize the data input and properly format it for consumption. Talk about a distraction from your core competencies.

The better solution is Finch, which provides integrations to major and boutique HR-management and payroll systems like QuickBooks, ADP Run, Workday, and Paylocity via one universal API. Finch unifies access to and smoothes over the differences among these systems to support many innovative use cases. And as we add new systems to our coverage network (which is always), you can turn them on in one click.

How Finch works

On the front end, Finch presents as a friendly, intuitive module that lets employers grant your application secure, instant, and regulation-compliant access to their payroll and HR systems. The process takes less than 30 seconds:

• Finch asks your user to link their payroll or HR system.
• Your user finds their system and enters their login credentials or API keys.
• The connection is established.

The connection allows your application to read information like census data, which streamlines onboarding and enrollment, as well as write information like contribution and deduction adjustments, which streamlines benefits management.

Basically, Finch makes innovation possible for health benefits providers that want to disrupt an industry that clearly stands ready for change.

But don’t just take our word for it

Learn how Finch is making it possible for Lane Health to offer first-of-their-kind, tax-advantaged loans to workers with HSAs–saving both Lane Health and its customers time and money in the process.

Want to know more about integrations for health benefits?

Click the black Request Access button in the upper-right of this webpage to submit a question or ask to see our API documentation.

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.

Before joining Finch, Phil Hong was honing his sales skills with leaders in his field. When he felt that he had reached his learning potential in his previous role, he sought out a new opportunity with a growing startup–somewhere he could really make his mark. In a recent conversation with Phil, we talked about the road that brought him to Finch and what he learned along the way.

Tell us about your role.

My official title is Enterprise Account Executive. My day-to-day consists of building relationships with prospects, building out processes and SOPs, implementing GTM strategies, communicating customer feedback, and evaluating where the market is and how Finch should approach it over the next three to six months.

What did you study in college?

I graduated from USC with a math/econ degree. I am not a math wizard by any means, but I like finding the objective truth in things. This gave me the quantitative reasoning skills set to communicate and resolve problems in both my personal and professional life.

What did you do next?

After graduation, I joined DocuSign’s sales team in San Francisco. I started as an Enterprise Market Development Representative. After a year, I was promoted to a Healthcare & Life Sciences Account Executive – my first closing role! It was humbling to work with top industry executives while also mentoring the next wave of sales reps. Docusign was a very rewarding company to be at and I cannot express how thankful I am for all the experiences. I was always surrounded by supportive leaders and coworkers. Thank you, DocuSign!

How did that lead to an opportunity at Finch?

My last role was getting slightly repetitive and I was mentally ready for a new challenge. Thankfully, Finch reached out. I went through the entire interview process and from my perspective, Ansel and I got along really well. Unfortunately, they decided not to move forward with me, because they were looking for someone more experienced.

It was heartbreaking because I really understood the problem Finch was going to solve and knew the potential Finch had. A few days later, I called Ansel and asked, “Hey, what if you brought me on as a sales consultant for a couple months? It’s a win-win situation! And then, as you build out the team, if there’s room, I’d be happy to join.” Ansel liked how I approached the situation–that I was solution oriented and did not just put up my hands and quit. So, I interviewed with an investor, pitched the team, and the rest is history.

What was it about Finch that made you go that extra mile?

The primary reason is the problem that Finch is solving. Simply put, there is data that is walled off and difficult to get to. If you can solve the data accessibility problem, you can solve the majority of the entire employment landscape problem. The impact that we are going to have on businesses and people in general is going to change the way the industry thinks about employment.

The second reason is realizing that Finch is a company where I would be working with very like-minded individuals who are hungry, who are passionate, and who are, quite frankly, smarter than me. That is the type of environment I strive to be in order to push myself and others around me.

What excites you about your work?

The people I’m interacting with. I'm selling to developers, engineers, and founders. It's exciting to hear their feedback and to learn about different businesses. I truly believe that Finch will solve problems beyond the surface level use cases we see today and will provide better employee opportunities for years to come.

What one word would you use to describe Finch?

Gritty is the best way to put it, because we are constantly coming up with— sometimes outside-the-box—creative solutions for our customers. It’s amazing how accessible our founders and team members are to respond to our customers. If there is a problem, we will fix it.

How do you feel about Finch’s remote-first policy?

It’s incredible. I travel a couple times a quarter. Sometimes, I'll work in New York, Texas, Florida, or small little ski towns. Finch allows me to do that, because, at the end of the day, geographic locations do not impact our work.

What are you passionate about?

I'm passionate about creating things. One of the cool things about Finch is I've been able to create a lot of the workflows, processes, and the foundation for Finch’s sales culture. Outside of work, I’m always creating business plans with my friends. We’ve printed t-shirts, purchased real estate, and invested in several projects together.

What else keeps you busy outside of work?

I like to spend my time snowboarding, golfing, and watching football. I played football growing up, through high school and for two years at a junior college where I received a scholarship to play at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Ultimately, I decided to attend USC because it was a better opportunity for me academically. That was a huge part of how I got to where I am. The majority of what I learned from that experience still applies to what I do today. It sets the foundation for my process-orientated way of thinking and acknowledging that having a strong work ethic is paramount to any career.

What are you proud of?

I am proud that I graduated from USC. I was the youngest of three boys raised by a single mom and came from very humble beginnings. Getting academic grants and scholarships to pay for USC was a monumental accomplishment for me.

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

Problem: Lane Health, the first company to offer tax-deductible medical loans for employees with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), needed a secure, compliant way to access employee data and track deductions of different amounts per every payroll period.

Solution: With Finch, Lane Health synchronizes employee data, enabling Lane Health to save 8-12 hours a month of manual data entry for employer admins!

Lane Health

An HSA is a tax-advantaged savings account. An HSA account holder can use it to pay for out-of-pocket qualified medical expenses for themselves and their dependents. Using untaxed dollars in an HSA to pay for copayments, deductibles, etc., can significantly reduce healthcare expenses. Yet many employees choose not to take advantage of an HSA—then regret that decision when faced with high medical bills.

Lane Health is revolutionizing the HSA industry by helping employees pay their medical bills through a unique line of credit. With Lane Health, employees can borrow against future deductions to pay their bills, even if the employee originally elected zero deductions. The company’s award-winning product helps employers stand out and gives employees peace of mind—especially since more than 60% of Americans cannot cover a surprise $1,000 expense.

The First Line of Credit + HSA

Lane Health was the first administrator to combine a line of credit with an HSA, allowing employers to offer tax-effective lending for employees. With Lane Health, employees can pay for care over 12 months, reduce their taxes, and lower their total cash outlay. While the product is especially attractive for employees with a high deductible health plan, Lane Health offers significant benefits to all employees—without risk or lending fees for employers.

In addition to their groundbreaking HSA, Lane Health provides Flexible Savings Accounts (FSAs), Dependent Care Savings Accounts, Commuter Benefits Accounts, and other popular tax-advantaged spending accounts, all bundled on a convenient, single card solution.

Managing Ever-Changing Deductions

For employees who do not elect to fund their HSA—then choose to borrow money through Lane Health—the amount deducted per paycheck will vary, depending on how much the employee owes, how they repay, and other factors. An employee might owe $12 one paycheck, $20 the next, then $25 the next. So instead of entering deductions once per year for 100 employees, for example, an employer now has to enter deductions once every payroll for a few dozen employees.

To accomplish their mission and grow their company, the Lane Health team needed to streamline integration of complex, ever-changing employee data across various payroll providers. However, they needed to move quickly and work within two highly regulated industries—HSAs and lending. That’s when Lane Health began looking for a better solution, and found Finch.

A Finch-Powered Solution for Health Savings Accounts

With Finch, the Lane Health team can save employers countless hours—and dollars—by syncing the entire employer’s system with Finch’s platform.

Previously, employer admins had to pay their payroll provider for a flat file for each payroll period, then send that file to Lane Health. Now, the employer can utilize Finch’s API to sync this data in just a few seconds at a fraction of the cost.

“It’s always an interesting opportunity to partner with somebody that can essentially solve problems, and Finch seems to offer exactly that,” explains Lenny Blyukher, Chief Technology Officer for Lane Health.

Impact

• ⏳ 8-12 hours a month saved by employer admins that would normally be spent updating information in Lane Health or exporting and importing flat files
• $50,000-$100,000 saved by Lane Health using Finch instead of building and maintaining an API in-house

Finch offers a very robust way to integrate with the industry standard web services, and automate all the things that we have to do manually on a regular basis.

Lenny Blyukher, Chief Technology Officer

Where Finch Fits In

All three use cases are unlocked in <30 seconds:

1. Lane Health’s onboarding flow asks employers to link their payroll system.
2. Admin users sync their organization’s system by passing their credentials through Finch's secure and compliant Connect Flow.
3. In a matter of seconds, Lane Health’s clients can start enrolling employees across the organization into HSA and additional benefits.

Peace of Mind for Employees

The exclusive Lane Health HSA makes paying medical bills easier for all employees—not just the few who choose to contribute to an HSA. Moving forward, Lane Health is on a mission to continue providing cutting-edge, inclusive products that improve financial wellness.

We’re sharing our pipeline with Finch, and they’re listening to our suggestions and helping drive our roadmap, which will continue to put us ahead of our competitors.

Crystal Peel, Vice President of Client Solutions

At Finch, we’re excited to support innovative platforms like Lane Health. If you’re interested in exploring workforce data, please send us a message here, and let’s unlock an entirely new use case together!

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.

Alex is originally from New Jersey but moved to California to study computer science at U.C. Berkeley. Now based in San Francisco, he’s happy to be back doing what he loves at a small but (rapidly!) growing company while still having time and opportunity in his personal life to take advantage of the best the West Coast has to offer. Learn more about Alex—and his advice for engineers just starting their careers—in our conversation below.

What brought you to Finch?

After spending several years working at enterprise and midsize organizations, I wanted to go back to my roots and join an early stage startup. It was important for me to find an opportunity to get in at the ground floor, because I wanted a lot of ownership, and I wanted to be able to take on a lot of different responsibilities and grow with the organization. There is good opportunity to do that here. I was also really impressed with how much traction the product was getting. Finch only had one or two engineers at the time, and they were already working with big companies. That was motivating—to be at the cusp of powering all of these other businesses.

Where were you before Finch?

When I was still in school, a couple of my friends and I created a startup and ended up taking some time off to keep pursuing it. I loved the camaraderie of the team and the feeling that I had a lot of impact on the end product. It was really fulfilling for me. When I finished school, I went in the complete opposite direction. I went to a gigantic company—Apple—where I started in mobile development before switching to machine learning. Then I went to a neobank called Digit, where I worked on the money management system. After that, I really wanted to go back to something small.

Tell us about your role.

My official title is founding software engineer. My responsibilities are varied, but it's mostly engineering work. I started out building our integrations with different payroll systems. Recently, I moved more into building new products. The project I’m working on now has been a little bit different than the rest of our endpoints, because we’re able to not just read from the system but also write back into it. And this week I'm doing product marketing, which I've never done before. So, I get to dabble. That's been cool.

What drives you to do the work that you’re doing here?

It’s evident that we’re building critical infrastructure for employment-oriented companies, so they can streamline manual processes. Knowing that we’re solving a real pain point, and that my role directly ties to clients’ needs, is really motivating for me.

What’s the most challenging aspect of your job?

The work is very open-ended; there's not really one right answer. And so, a lot of it requires creative solutions. But that's also what makes it fascinating to me—the fact that it's not always a straightforward task. I have to dig and take different angles. For example, there's not really a roadmap for the product I’m working on. The challenge is how you scope it down and identify the needs of the customer and then figuring out how that all fits together. It’s the hard part but also the fun part.

What makes you a good fit for your role and for Finch?

I really care about the bottom line. I wouldn't work on something just because I thought it was interesting if it has no actual impact on the business. I‘m kind of existential in that way. I like to ask myself, “Why am I even doing this?” I need to know that what I'm working on is important and that it's going to make a difference in the outcome of the company.

What do you like most about working at Finch?

What I like most is that the people are really authentic. I think that's kind of rare, and it's definitely something that I value. I feel like everyone can be themselves here, and there's no weird power dynamics or hierarchies. Everyone is at Finch for the same reasons.

How would you describe Finch in one word?

We have this part of our values that basically means not getting too high off of the highs or too low off the lows—just making sure to keep looking toward the next opportunity. So, I think levelheaded is the right word for that.

When you’re not plugging away at work, what do you do for fun?

My main thing is hiking and backpacking with friends. I try to do both as often as I can, usually every weekend. Most recently, I spent time in Sequoia National Park, Colorado, and Yosemite. That's one of the reasons that I like living in the western part of the U.S. I’m always trying to get outside and into the mountains as much as I can.

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

Try to get a breadth of exposure to problems as early as possible—startups are the best for this! You’ll feel like you’re floundering a bit, but it will give you a general framework of what you like and don’t like, and it will help you think about new problems from different angles throughout your career.

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

Workday: an innovative, cutting-edge enterprise software solution

Workday started in 2005 when two software visionaries, Aneel Bhusri and Dave Duffield, decided to start a company that would transform the enterprise software market. The company quickly launched two revolutionary product offerings - Workday Human Capital Management in 2006 and Workday Financial Management in 2007. They went public in October 2012 and celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2015, with more than 1,000 customers, each with 500+ employees.

Today, Workday supports more than 9,500 customers globally with more than 50 customers employing 100,000 employees. As of September 2021, the platform manages records for 120 million people including 55 million active employees. Today, the platform continues to expand its full suite of services to create a more cohesive enterprise experience.

How do I get access to the Workday 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 Workday integration.)

With Finch, you get access to the Workday integration as well as 110+ other major employment providers (QuickBooks, ADP RUN, Gusto, 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.

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.

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of Benefits, a product that enables developers, benefits administrators, and employment providers to enable holistic benefits management—including benefits creation, employee enrollment, and deduction and contribution updates—across employment providers via a single API.

At Finch, we are on a mission to power the future of employment, and a huge piece of employment involves benefits. As the employee benefits landscape becomes increasingly digital and competitive, existing benefits providers need to be able to scale rapidly. In addition, benefits expectations have changed drastically over the past 18 months. From small businesses to large enterprises, there is more demand than ever from employees for quality benefits, and new solutions are popping up to fill those needs. We're excited for this new product to provide seamless control over benefits data so you can deliver these much-needed services to employers.

The current situation— multiple systems, complicated processes

Today, benefit providers sell to employers across a whole range of different employment systems, from Gusto™ to Zenefits to Insperity® and more. These benefits providers not only need the ability to retrieve employee records when a new member joins, but also process deductions and benefits enrollment to move money from payroll compliantly. The requirement to process deductions and enrollment is further complicated given money movement and employment regulations.

Existing solutions are error-prone and time-intensive

Today, there are generally three options for benefits providers—

• SFTP—Most of the health insurance, health benefits, and retirement sector currently upload files to be consumed via SFTP. This is the standard in the industry but it is not real-time and is prone to errors.
• Partnerships—Partnering directly with payroll providers can require several months of partnerships and business development effort on top of technical integration work.
• Product Operations— Building out an in-house product operations team to pull reports and manually make changes to the system.

Many times, this benefits infrastructure is cobbled together with millions of dollars in development cost and is extremely difficult to maintain. Benefits changes the game. We have rebuilt this infrastructure from the ground up using modern API connectivity. Gone are the days of depending on painful CSV uploads, antiquated SFTP transfers, or error-prone internal product operations teams. With Benefits, Finch's platform can support the growth and expansion of our partners for today's increasingly digital and fragmented employment landscape.

Easy to set up, robust functionality

Benefits is comprised of a few simple endpoints under /employer/benefits/ to set up company benefits as well as enroll individuals—

/employer/benefits

• Supports 17 benefit types (401(k), 403(b), HSA, FSA, and more)
• Provides detailed benefits information including frequency, company contributions, and employee deductions
• New company benefits can also be created via the API
• Robust feature set covering catch-up limits for retirement benefits, flexible annual maximums for HSAs, and other benefits-specific configurations

/employer/benefits/{benefit_id}/individuals

• Provide individual enrollment information including individual deductions, contribution limits, and other configuration information relevant to the specific benefit
• Individuals can be enrolled in and unenrolled from company benefits via the API

You can enable the benefits product for supported providers today by simply configuring your application to request permission for the new benefits scope on Finch Connect.

Trusted data integrity and security

As with all of our products, Finch takes data integrity and security very seriously, and our Benefits product is no different. None of this sensitive data is stored by Finch, but rather it is passed through from the application to the underlying provider. Since we are a pass-through layer, we build on top of all of the existing fail-safes for communicating issues and tracking deductions and contribution limits, just as the underlying payroll systems do.

Already improving acquisition and retention

Benefits is already being used by customers from sectors including HSA, FSA, 401(k), payroll-backed lending, and more. Hear directly from some of our customers—

Operational efficiency and employer coverage was a bottleneck to our sales efforts. Finch Benefits allowed us to drive real-time management around deductions and enrollment and therefore increase our customer acquisition and retention. Our sales and operations teams are extremely happy!

CPO of a large enterprise powering a new workplace savings program

Finch has allowed us to streamline our required integrations with our client's payroll administrators, freeing our clients and Lane Health from having to expend time and resources to perform these payroll system integrations and file exchanges.  By providing Lane Health with access to 95 payroll systems, we can deliver a superior client experience very effectively and efficiently.  Finch has and will continue to be a valued partner for enabling our growth and achieving our business goals.

Crystal Peel, VP of Client Solutions @ Lane Health

The Finch team have been valuable partners to us as we navigate the various complex aspects of 401(k) administration and compliance, and how payroll and contribution data factor into that equation. We couldn't be more pleased with our partnership with Finch so far and are equally excited for the future as Finch continues to evolve their service platform to include more valuable features and benefits.

Justin Young, Senior Manager of Product Development @ Slavic401k

We would like to extend a big thank you to all of our early users who provided invaluable feedback during the build!

Getting started with Benefits

If you’re an existing Finch customer, you can enable the Benefits product today by reaching out to your account manager to get started. Developers new to Finch can reach out to developers@tryfinch.com.

Stay tuned as we continue to update the endpoint with additional benefits categories. We look forward to supporting you in what you build next to create innovations for employers and employees.

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.

Problem — Pry needed to empower business decision-makers with detailed headcount cost data to supercharge their financial planning process.

Solution — With Finch, Pry is able to surface key insights into employee and contractor costs.

Finance for Founders

Pry is on a mission to empower founders to make better financial decisions.

Running out of cash is the second most common reason start-ups fail, surpassed by the lack of product-market fit. According to CB insights, 29% of start-ups surveyed pointed to cash burn as a key driver of business collapse. For founders busy building, it can be challenging to monitor all the moving pieces of their finances across systems to ensure they have enough runway.

With Pry, businesses can have their accounting, financial planning, and business intelligence all in one place. Features include but not limited to cash runway forecasting, budget vs. actuals, customizable models, hiring plans, scenario planning, and custom dashboards.

In a previous life, I cofounded a tech-enabled accounting company. We helped thousands of companies keep their books (accounting) up to date. While growing, I could feel Javascript improve year after year but the way our finances were done in Excel just got worse and worse. The product I wanted was simple: something to replace the Excel files that the finance gurus use. Pry is that solution that can handle everything from revenue modeling to headcount planning. 

Andy Su, Co-founder & CEO

To accomplish this mission, Pry needed to incorporate data on one of the highest costs for most start-ups: their employees and contractors.

A Finch-Powered Solution for Headcount Planning

Using Finch, the Pry team is able to seamlessly pull in live department and compensation data for each individual at the company and automatically categorize them based on the P&L segments. It’s a nuanced automation but one that materially improves the accuracy of headcount planning.

Previously, admins would need to manually enter in layers of assumptions and categorizations to ensure their team was accurately represented in their financial model. Working with Finch to pull in the raw data from workforce systems, Pry can reduce that manual work into a 30-second sync and keep it updated as the company grows the team.

The Impact:

🔑 70% increase in headcount planning data after 3 days from sign-up.

With Finch, we are able to split employees by department and access data that no one else has (unique resource for financial planning). We care about this because we care about our conversion funnel. Anything that reduces friction and contributes to our conversion funnel is very important from a bottom-up approach. 

Hayden Jensen, Co-Founder & CTO

Where Finch fits in

Pry unlocks headcount planning in <30 seconds:

1. Pry’s dashboard requests employers to link their payroll system.
2. Admin users sync their organization’s system by passing their credentials through Finch’s secure Connect Flow.
3. In a matter of seconds, Pry’s clients can start building headcount planning scenarios to better understand their business’s trajectory.

The end result is a beautiful UX with actionable headcount insights for founders and decision-makers.

Extending Strategic Finance Across the Ecosystem

Over the long term, Pry’s goal is to unlock financial insights for start-ups, CPAs, and investors.

Headcount planning powered by Finch is just the first step in a long journey to improve the future of strategic finance.

Working with Finch has been great. They’re constantly working on adding new integrations to provide better coverage and support for our clients. For any company that has employees and/or is planning to hire, I can’t imagine not using Finch to help automate headcount planning. 

Tiffany Wong, Co-Founder & Head of Ops

At Finch, we’re excited to support innovative platforms like Pry (sign up here!). If you’re interested in exploring workforce data for your application, please send us a message here and let’s unlock a completely new use case together!

Secureframe is on a mission to make the most powerful security simple and accessible for every organization.

Secureframe allows companies to unlock enterprise opportunities by becoming SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant within weeks, rather than months. The platform automatically monitors 25+ services to assess security practices and ensure compliance standards are met. Secureframe continuously collects audit evidence, runs security awareness training, monitors infrastructure, and more, all automatically.

Highlights:

🔗 30+ integrations — Secureframe uses 30+ of Finch’s integrations to address their growing range of customers that utilize different providers.

👩🏽‍💼 10,000+ individuals connected — Every customer’s employees and contractors need to be accounted for to ensure they undergo multiple compliance requirements like background checks and cybersecurity training.

⏳ <30 seconds to sync — Finch’s streamlined Connect Flow allows Secureframe customers to sync their workforce data in <30 seconds so business leaders can focus on higher priority compliance measures.

Without Finch — Disjointed User Experience

Before implementing Finch, Secureframe had to build integrations one at a time with each offering a disjointed user experience. Customers often had to leave the interface altogether to navigate through their payroll system, completely breaking the user flow. The support team had to walk customers through the process manually to troubleshoot issues, navigate the nuances of each system, and confirm that the right permissions were set. The rapid expansion of the platform’s customer base compounded the UX friction with every new client.

Accessing live employee information is essential for Secureframe’s customers to maintain SOC 2 compliance since every employee needs to undergo background checks, review company policies, and complete security training as soon as they join. Gathering this data is one of the first steps in the account creation process. Without a live view into the HR systems, Secureframe wouldn’t be able to offer customers powerful automation tools to make compliance easy at scale.

Compliance is not just a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing process that only gets more complex as organizations scale up. We need to have a live view into our customers’ headcount data no matter what systems they use so there’s no lapse in compliance. We chose Finch since their mission critical infrastructure is the most reliable and offers the best coverage for our growing customer base. 

Shrav Mehta, Founder & CEO

With Finch — Unified User Flow & Continuous Compliance

Today, with Finch integrated, Secureframe can allow customers to seamlessly sync their HR system and move onto higher value compliance tasks. The entire process was reduced to <30 seconds vs. 10–15 minutes seen previously with a more fragmented user experience that often required live support.

1. Customers select their HR provider within Secureframe’s dashboard.
2. Customers authenticate their account using Finch Connect, Finch’s secure, standardized authorization experience that embeds explicit data permissions.
3. Fin! In a few seconds, Secureframe can start automating security compliance as customers scale up their teams.

Now, with access to live census data via Finch, Secureframe can automatically add new employees and contractors to compliance checklists so there’s a minimal lapse in compliance for customers. As the platform’s customers grow their headcount Secureframe can work in the background to ensure best practices are reinforced across the organization in real-time.

Integrations are an important part of Secureframe’s platform since we have to monitor a wide range of vendors for our customers. Syncing with HR systems was a top priority as it allows us to automate individual employee compliance. Finch’s single integration unlocked support for many HR systems. 

Natasja Nielsen, Founder & CTO

Post Integration

Secureframe and Finch are just starting to unlock compliance automation using workforce data. Live employee data can be used to identify key stakeholders responsible for different security processes, proactively reach out to individuals that need to re-take security training, and more.

At Finch, we’re excited to partner with game-changing platforms like Secureframe. If you’re interested in exploring workforce data, reach out to us here and start building on our API.

Mosaic is building the future of strategic finance by empowering companies of all sizes to make better financial decisions.

In today’s SaaS-driven world, the data business leaders need to make effective decisions is siloed across many different systems. When critical financial information lives in disjointed tools like ERP, CRM, and HR platforms, it is almost impossible to get a real-time view of your business.

Mosaic has built a next-gen financial reporting and forecasting system that seamlessly integrates data from key business systems (Billing, ERP, CRM, HRIS) into a single source of truth that can act as a compass for business leaders. By tackling this complex data integration problem, Mosaic enables modern teams to spend time on strategic and forward-looking growth initiatives.

Highlights:

📈 70% of SaaS company spend is driven by employees. Understanding the cost of your people is vital for efficient growth. Finch enabled Mosaic to rapidly serve companies using a wide range of HR Systems.

📐 20+ key metrics — Integrating Payroll and HR data to Mosaic unlocked real-time insights into 20+ key metrics including employee churn, department costs, fully loaded cost per employee, sales efficiency metrics, and more.

⏩ 94% faster integration — Finch enabled Mosaic to build connections with HR providers 94% faster than building them all in-house.

Without Finch — Building Costly in-House Integrations

Before Finch, the Mosaic team was building integrations one by one with different providers. This process varied across systems and required lengthy business development and technical discussions that stretched months.

The engineering team had to build out a data mapping system to ensure compatibility across platforms. The slow rollout of new integrations and incremental engineering efforts required meant that not all customers could unlock live workforce insights needed to run their businesses effectively.

Mosaic’s wide range of customers and use cases meant they needed to support multiple systems quickly. HR and Payroll data is a critical component of Mosaic’s comprehensive strategic finance platform — without it, they wouldn’t be able to provide detailed insights into the largest expense for most businesses.

Employees are the largest expense for most businesses, meaning that decision-makers need a comprehensive view of their employee’s costs to build smart, sustainable headcount planning strategies. Finch helps us build that view for a broader range of customers. 

Bijan Moallemi, Co-Founder & CEO

With Finch — Seamless Expansion of Coverage

Today, using Finch, Mosaic is able to service an ever-expanding range of customers with the platform’s growing list of supported providers while saving hundreds of engineering hours. Integrating with Finch took only 4 days instead of the grueling month-long project necessary for separate connections with each provider.

Customers can now authorize Mosaic to retrieve key data from their payroll and HR systems providing actionable metrics that directly improve the health of their businesses. On the back-end, the engineering team can rely on Finch’s standardized data schema to seamlessly pull information and make live calculations regardless of the underlying provider.

1. Finch Connect, Finch’s secure, standardized authorization flow, prompts customers to select their payroll provider.
2. Customers authenticate their payroll accounts and authorize the key set of permissions Mosaic requests by entering their admin credentials.
3. Voila! In a matter of seconds, Mosaic can start surfacing payroll data insights to business leaders.

The power of our platform is the ability to synthesize disparate data patterns and distill them into actionable signals. Our engineering resources need to be focused on this core imperative. Finch’s quick integration process and scalable infrastructure allows us to dedicate more engineering hours to value-driving initiatives. 

Luke Braud, CTO

Post Integration

Finch and Mosaic continue to work together to unlock new endpoints, coverage partners, and edge cases that better capture the differences in the organization structure. As Mosaic refines its powerful analytical engine, Finch can provide greater granularity into employee data to generate new metrics for tracking business health. This partnership is just the beginning.

The tools we’re building on top of Finch increase engagement across our platform. Now we can help a wider range of businesses across the country make smarter, data-driven strategic decisions. We’re excited for the future of this partnership.

Brian Campbell, Co-Founder & CPO

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

Finch and Codat are partnering to empower financial institutions to supply the funds SMBs need to weather economic challenges, starting with PPP loans.

What is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)?

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) represented an unprecedented action by Congress to help SMBs that experienced major business disruption in the wake of the global pandemic. Over 5.2 million loans were approved by 5,460 lenders totaling $525B as of August 2020.

In January 2021 the second wave of PPP loans was made available totaling $284B in order to provide additional emergency financial support to SMBs.

There was a range of problems experienced by the first round of PPP loans. Lack of clarity on the correct forms that needed to be completed, large corporates being provided with loans whilst the small businesses were left hanging; and a complete lack of understanding into how forgiveness worked.

This time around businesses and lenders are better equipped to receive and offer funding through the program, but it’s still not an easy process.

So what is the process?

The number of steps and the depth of information required from various systems to facilitate a successful PPP loan can be overwhelming.

SMBs have to fulfill a range of eligibility requirements. They must dig up key business data, calculate estimated loan amounts using average payroll costs, and then go through a separate process to apply for forgiveness that includes cost summaries for qualified expenses.

Lenders have to conduct good-faith reviews for loan amounts, disburse funds quickly, and confirm the qualified expenses by asking for proof.

A partnership that streamlines PPP application all via a single API

While submitting an application, businesses are required to provide:

• Proof they have suffered a decrease in revenue
• A detailed breakdown of the business’s expenses along with the receipts attached to those expenses
• Granular employee-specific information as well as aggregate wage amount

This can take small business owners hours, if not days to produce manually.

Many of these data points can be made accessible through Finch and Codat’s platforms to help SMBs and lenders make the most out of this program, seamlessly & securely allowing these businesses to share their payroll and accounting data with lenders.

Using Finch, lenders can retrieve key payroll information directly from the business’s payroll system for specified periods, employee-level data to calculate the maximum loan eligibility and auto-populate key business data required in the PPP loan application.

Lenders can use Codat to obtain access to accounting data, including existing debt & expenses as well as revenue, to build a comprehensive view of the SMB’s financial situation. Codat also allows lenders to extract key evidence to support the expense claims (i.e. receipts).

Once the capital is disbursed, lenders servicing the loans can utilize the same ongoing connections to confirm how the funds were spent, using Finch to confirm payroll spend and Codat to verify other qualified business expenses. All without businesses having to re-authorize the connection to their financial software.

Using both platforms lenders can cut down application time and reduce errors that could arise from manual calculations.

Finch and Codat combined can help lenders make a faster impact on SMBs with access to PPP loans.

For more information on how Finch and Codat can help you please reach out to the Finch team at founders@tryfinch.com or Codat directly at info@codat.io.

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.