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

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

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

Awardco: Real-time data is ‘table stakes’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building integrations at scale

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

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

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

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

UKG: Partnerships are a ‘competitive advantage’

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

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

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

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

Finch expedites time to launch by over 80%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 2018, 401GO set out to build a platform that would make 401(k) plans accessible to all businesses. Their proprietary system lets employers set up a plan in as little as 15 minutes and outsource all of the administrative work, from enrollment to end-of-year reporting.

From the beginning, the 401GO team knew payroll integrations would be pivotal to their success. And while the company has an impressive engineering team, leadership wanted to ensure they were pursuing every avenue of expanding their integration network. So they turned to Finch.

Today, 401GO uses a combination of internal development resources and Finch-powered 401(k) payroll integrations to pull sponsor data and automate payroll processing to provide the ultimate employer experience. 

Empowering 401(k) sponsors through data

Without HR professionals dedicated to the complexities of plan administration, retirement plans have long been out of reach for many small businesses. 401GO launched in 2019 with a mission to change that narrative by taking on all of the administrative burden for their customers. 

“The idea that you can automate a process for a business owner is amazing,” said Jared Porter, co-founder and COO. “Our platform allows them to do all the things that you’d normally have an HR professional do. They’re meeting all the criteria for a 401(k) plan, but they’re not having to hire another employee to do it.”

That automation is why Jared and the rest of the team at 401GO knew they’d need payroll integrations. To take the administrative responsibility off their customers’ plates, they’d need reliable, automatic access to employment data. 

“The data that we're getting is so important to 401(k) administration,” Jared said. “It’s what allows us to send out notifications, enroll employees as they become eligible, and complete end-of-year reporting so the company, without even realizing it, is the best fiduciary. We’re leveraging payroll integrations to do that.”

Custom API payroll integrations > SFTP

From the beginning, API-powered payroll integrations were at the forefront of 401GO’s strategy. The team views other integration methods like SFTP as functional but far from ideal.

“The problem with SFTP is that it’s like you’re using half a car,” Jared explained. “Business owners don't understand that we’re going to have to accommodate for the other side of the car that’s missing.

“But with an API, you’re removing so much of the overhead and complexity, and it’s consistent. The updates are immediate. Everything is happening in a way that no human could do. And SFTP, as a file exchange of data, is really hard to scale.”

"With an API, you’re removing so much of the overhead and complexity, and it’s consistent. The updates are immediate. ... And SFTP, as a file exchange of data, is really hard to scale.”

In some cases, 401GO’s operations team performs the work on the employer’s behalf as part of their True360™ service; but API integrations can automate much of that process, freeing up internal resources to focus on supporting customers and taking on new accounts.

“The most straightforward thing is the data transfer, the idea that what's in the payroll system is now reflected in the 401(k) system. It’s not mind blowing, but the fact that data from payroll is being moved in real time into our platform so the plan is in compliance — that’s really valuable,” Jared said. 

Leveraging Finch to expand 401GO’s provider network

401GO has already built plenty of integrations in-house through its talented development team. But the payroll market is infamous for being fragmented, with nearly 6,000 systems in the US alone — and not all of them will allow retirement providers like 401GO to access their APIs. 

Gusto proved to be one such provider. With such a large volume of integration requests, Gusto couldn’t accommodate a direct partnership with 401GO, but they suggested an alternative: Finch. 

Related: Finch partners with Gusto to unlock the next wave of innovation in HR Tech

Once 401GO built to the Finch API, the company was able to access a pre-built integration with Gusto that allows its customers to authorize access to their payroll data in as little as 30 seconds. And since the Finch integration only needs to be configured once, 401GO can now expand their access to any of Finch’s 200+ supported HRIS and payroll providers without negotiating individual partnerships or building new integrations from scratch.

“A lot of our integrations with payroll companies are customized, so there's not one thing on our side that can connect them all. But having an aggregator like Finch is amazing, because we can connect into any one system that Finch is connected to. Then as Finch expands those relationships and its network of providers, that makes it a lot easier for us and a little more affordable to connect with more payroll providers,” Jared said. 

"Having an aggregator like Finch is amazing, because we can connect into any one system that Finch is connected to. Then as Finch expands those relationships and its network of providers, that makes it a lot easier for us and a little more affordable to connect with more payroll providers.”

Finch integrations can also be launched faster. The 401GO development team can build an integration in about 3 months, but that’s followed by a year-long monitoring and testing period. Finch allows the team to skip this step because their connection to the Finch API has already been proven, and because there’s a support team available to resolve issues that may arise on the payroll provider’s end. 

Since launching its Gusto integration, 401GO has also used Finch to integrate with Intuit Quickbooks — empowering automatic data collection and processing for 3x more customers. 

401GO still builds its own 1:1 integrations with payroll providers, but views Finch as a powerful tool in its arsenal as the company continues to grow and bring on customers with other payroll platforms. 

“It’s like retirement — you don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” Jared said. “Finch gives you options, and it allows you to go in different directions as needed.”

Addition Wealth is a financial wellness company that makes personalized financial expertise more inclusive and accessible. To do this, Addition partners with forward-thinking companies to support employees and individuals to work through personal finance decisions. 

As part of the offering, individuals get access to a digital platform that brings together information from their employer, including benefits information, alongside an individual’s own personal finance accounts to give a holistic overview of what is offered by their company and what an individual already has. In the platform, Addition Wealth also offers individuals a recommended set of actions, including courses on personal finance topics, digital tools, content, checklists, and webinars. Individuals also have the option to speak with fully vetted financial advisors by booking an online virtual meeting.

Because Addition Wealth tailors its offering based on the employer or client they are working with, they needed a way to efficiently manage select employee data—so they turned to Finch. Today, the company leverages Finch to integrate with several HRIS and payroll providers to enhance their customers’ experience by seamlessly bringing in relevant data into the platform.

Democratizing access to quality financial advice

Addition Wealth works with employers by delivering tailored programs that help decrease employee stress, drive higher candidate acceptance rates, and increase overall employee retention. With its personalized approach, Addition can help any employee understand their unique financial situations and navigate through tough decisions, whether they are buying their first home, paying down debt, or planning for retirement.

“Our mission is to enable people to make the most of their money and bring personalized financial expertise to the masses,” said Amy Chou, Chief Product Officer. “It's extremely hard, unless you're already wealthy, to get access to high-quality financial advice. We help the average person get high-quality answers to their financial questions so they can live a healthier financial life.”

As an employer-sponsored benefit, Addition Wealth’s financial wellness platform provides individuals with the tools, resources, and insights they need to be financially healthy based on their own personal circumstances. Each digital platform experience is tailored to the company and the benefits they offer, from equity to student loan assistance. 

“A lot of employees aren’t taking full advantage of their benefits. Employers want their employees to use the benefits they’re given, and to value them,” Amy explained. “When employees understand the true value of their benefits, they’re more likely to stay with the company and be happy in their role.”

Reliable, consistent, comprehensive data delivery

Addition Wealth needs access to specific data to provide tailored insights to employees receiving access to their platform– for example, employee directories and salary information. Traditional methods of accessing that data like manually sending files or leveraging SFTP connections work, but it means that Addition Wealth may not have access to the most up to date information.

Finch’s API integrations, on the other hand, provide daily or on-demand data syncs. That means that if an employee’s data changes—say, for example, they get a raise or change their retirement plan contribution—Addition Wealth is able to immediately reflect the updates on their dashboard.

“We love the idea of being able to get real-time feedback on these very important pieces of information, versus having to wait for the monthly update. That’s what motivated us to work with Finch,” Amy said. 

“We love the idea of being able to get real-time feedback on these very important pieces of information, versus having to wait for the monthly update. That’s what motivated us to work with Finch."

Saying goodbye to SFTP headaches and manual intervention

Addition Wealth works with companies of all sizes—from early-stage startups to enterprise businesses. Managing small file transfers is one thing, but sending enormous data sets typically requires an SFTP integration, which can be a cumbersome, complicated process that involves a lot of back-and-forth. 

“For some of our customers due to their size, it can be difficult to batch files. It may take a long time, so it’s just easier to plug into something that already exists,” Amy said. 

Even the smoothest SFTP integration process can present a big hurdle for large employers; but there’s also a lot that can go wrong along the way: failed sends, NIGO errors, and corrupted files, to name a few. 

Customers that onboard using a Finch integration can authorize Addition Wealth to access the data in their HRIS and payroll system through Finch Connect, which takes only a few minutes to complete. The connection is continuous, meaning Addition Wealth can simply pull the data they need, when they need it.

Simplified data mapping saves hours of manual work

To take things a step further, Finch saves Addition Wealth time by standardizing all of the data through a unified API. 

Regardless of the HRIS or payroll provider that the employer uses, data pulled through Finch is always in the same format. In other words, data is mapped across different providers’ various field names to a single, consistent field name.

“Because Finch’s API standardizes the data, it’s a pretty easy 1:1 mapping versus needing to figure out what each client calls the same field, where some may call it ‘Salary’ and another ‘Salary Field 1,’” Amy explained. “That’s something we’d otherwise need to write into the code for each client, but we don’t have those issues with Finch because it’s all the same field—it’s just called ‘Salary.’”

Finch and Addition Wealth: Growing together

Amy noted that HRIS and payroll integrations provide value before a customer has even signed on with Addition Wealth. 

“Finch is a benefit in the sales process,” she said. “When prospective customers ask if we can integrate with their HRIS, Finch enables us to very easily say yes. People like having that option.”

“Finch is a benefit in the sales process. When prospective customers ask if we can integrate with their HRIS, Finch enables us to very easily say yes."

As both Addition Wealth and Finch continue to grow and expand their product offerings, Amy said she looks forward to leveraging even deeper real-time insights for employees.

“We’re pretty excited, as Finch continues to expand its capabilities, to bring in more nuanced information about employee benefits and estimate their collective value for the individual employee,” she said. “Integrations make things easier for end users—the more integrations, the better. It's just about finding the integrations that work best for the use case.”

Exhale is a financial wellness platform that delivers a comprehensive suite of employer-sponsored benefits ranging from earned wage access to interest-free advances and smart savings tools with rewards.

With a focus on hourly workers in industries like services, transportation, and retail, Exhale needed a way to pull current and historical pay statements to get a holistic view of each employee and their variable earnings. Before launching the product, they sought out a unified API provider that could give them direct integrations to multiple payroll systems.

Today, Finch’s payroll integrations save the Exhale team 40 hours per week and allow employees to access their benefits two weeks faster.

Financial wellness benefits for every employee

Exhale was created to help employers who were struggling to navigate the administrative and regulatory complexities of giving their employees cash advances. A well-intentioned advance to help an employee pay for a flat tire or medical bill can put undue risk on the employer if not administered appropriately. At the same time, many financially stressed employees are hesitant to ask for help directly, which can make them more likely to turn to payday lenders or rack up credit card debt. 

The platform makes it easier for employers to support their workforce with financial wellness benefits that keep employees financially healthy while helping them build a safety net. 

“We found that people need different things at different times. The goal of the product is to help alleviate cash flow problems for people,” said Giaco Corsiglia, Exhale’s Lead Engineer. 

Exhale’s “Perks” include Earned Wage Access (EWA), interest-free cash advances that can be paid back from an employee’s paycheck, and saving tools that reward employees for contributing  for a certain period of time or hitting designated benchmarks.

On the employer side, Exhale helps reduce turnover, fosters employee loyalty, and boosts productivity by mitigating financial stress among employees. 

“It's a super cost-effective way to drive retention and employee loyalty in a way that is actually doing right by your employees,” Corsiglia said. 

Getting established with time-saving automation

To deliver on their product vision, the Exhale team knew they’d need visibility into each employee’s expected take-home pay and the ability to route funds from payroll—whether that be to the employee’s bank account, an Exhale Save account, or back to themselves in the form of repayment for cash advances. All this would require integrations to potentially hundreds of different payroll systems—or significant manual work from employers.

Exhale chose to work with Finch for its industry-leading coverage of payroll systems and data granularity. As Corsiglia put it, the team was confident that their product roadmap wouldn’t be hindered by limitations of Finch’s API. 

“Payroll is just so fragmented, and we didn’t want to limit our client pool by picking one payroll software to integrate with,” Corsiglia explained. “Without Finch, we would have had to build API integrations with 100 different payroll systems in-house or we would have had to say no to a bunch of our early clients.”

"Without Finch, we would have had to build API integrations with 100 different payroll systems in-house or we would have had to say no to a bunch of our early clients."

Exhale still supports manual operations for some employers, but the resource-intensive process takes an hour each week per each employer. By leveraging automation through their payroll integrations, Exhale estimates they’ve saved about 40 hours per week for their Operations team.

“Our manual version works, and we make it as painless for our customers as possible, but it's always preferable to just say, ‘Oh, you sign in to payroll, and then you just never worry about it again.’”

‘Set it and forget it’

Employers, especially those in fast-paced service industries, have enough on their plate; so it’s important to Exhale that their product is as easy to use as possible. 

With integrations to each employer’s payroll system, Exhale is able to  pull organization and payroll data automatically to enroll employees as they’re hired, unenroll employees after a termination, and receive new and historical pay data without manual file uploads. Once the initial connection is made, employers don’t have to think about administering the benefits; an automatic invitation system allows employees to sign up for Exhale’s Perks whenever they want.

“With our integrations, we can offer these benefits automatically, and setting up Exhale is sort of set-it-and-forget-it,” Corsiglia said. “If employers had to be duplicating records manually between payroll and Exhale, not only would it be error-prone, it would just be time consuming. Our goal is to give employers less to worry about, not more.”

Plus, with access to historical pay data through Finch, Exhale can offer all of their Perks to employees on the same day the payroll connection is verified—up to 2 weeks faster than if Exhale had to wait for data from the next pay cycle. 

Unlocking new value and insights with payroll data

Because most people using Exhale are hourly employees, take-home pay can fluctuate significantly with each pay period. To get a holistic view of each employee’s financial situation and determine what they can safely afford to borrow, Exhale needs access to historical data. 

Rather than relying on the employer to send pay data dating back months or delaying employees’ access to their financial benefits, Exhale is able to pull that information directly from the payroll system at any time. 

“Take Earned Wage Access for example. We have to know how much you've earned to give you a portion of your pay ahead of time. We also have to know what your earnings typically are, so we can give you an amount that you can safely pay back,” Corsiglia said. “By pulling that data out of payroll via Finch, we can get tons of historical pay data for our users. They sign up for Exhale, and it's like, ‘Oh, here you go. You can have $100 today because we know what your paycheck is going to be.’”

Nikki Collister, Product Content Lead at Exhale, added that historical payroll data allows the product to surface insights for employers that they might not be able to glean from their payroll system alone, like average income levels across different business locations or average tenure. 

“The payroll integrations we have through Finch have helped us to understand our impact on each of these clients and show how Exhale has delivered value over time,” she said. “It not only helps us provide better benefits, but it helps the employers better understand their business and their employees.”

“[Finch] not only helps us provide better benefits, but it helps the employers better understand their business and their employees.”

Unlocking innovation with payroll integrations

In the coming months and years, Exhale plans to expand their suite of financial wellness solutions with Finch’s payroll integrations. The latest product the company is working on addresses one of the biggest reasons employees request advances from Exhale today: rent payment. This solution—which will allow Exhale to facilitate on-time rent payments that employees then pay back in smaller increments from their paycheck—is another way of providing extra breathing room for those living paycheck-to-paycheck or looking to better manage their budget.  

“We’ll continue to grow our suite, and some of that growth will require deeper integrations with payroll,” Corsiglia said. “Our goal is to become the home for all of the financial benefits you might offer your employees.” 

Saveday, a zero-employer cost 401(k) provider, has built its company ethos around the Golden Rule: treat others as you would like to be. To cultivate this service-first culture, the company needed a way to remove as much friction as possible from the employer experience, from onboarding to day-to-day operations. 

Today, Saveday integrates with 40 different payroll providers through Finch to power retirement plans for more than 300 employers. Since transitioning from manual operations to automated integrations, Saveday has reduced onboarding time from 5 hours to less than 15 minutes and reduced payroll processing time by nearly 100%.

Manual Processes: When Good Isn’t Good Enough

Before partnering with Finch, Saveday ran its operations the way most 401(k) providers have for decades: the Operations team collected employers’ payroll data through automated file transfer, manual uploads, or even tools like Dropbox, then normalized and entered that data into the Saveday system. 

“We were too inefficient, we were losing too much money, we were experiencing too many errors. We were spending all of our time trying to be in compliance with plans,” explained CTO Albert Swantner. “Just because of the sheer amount of data we were trying to sift through, it was hard for us to keep track of it all.”

"We were spending all of our time trying to be in compliance with plans. Just because of the sheer amount of data we were trying to sift through, it was hard for us to keep track of it all.”

Even under the best of circumstances, processing an individual sponsor’s payroll took 2 hours on average. But there were other factors at play: sometimes sponsors forgot how to export the data correctly, or their main point of contact left the company or went on vacation, taking their institutional knowledge with them. Other times, typos made their way into the manual data entry, or sponsors were late in sending their data.

Processing hundreds of payrolls manually each week was time-intensive and made it all too easy to make contributions late or calculate deductions wrong. That had big implications for Saveday, from spending hours on back-calculations and corrections to making up the cost difference in what the investment should have been—all of which amounted to direct, hard costs against the company’s bottom line.  

“There was a whole workflow of things that all had to be perfect,” Albert said. “It's not good enough to just be good in this business—it has to be perfect.”

Data at the right place at the right time

The team at Saveday had tried to make their processes more efficient by building 1:1 API integrations with the payroll providers they encountered most often, but none ever made it “across the finish line.” When Albert joined as CTO in 2023, he immediately began looking for a unified API solution.

“From an engineer’s perspective, it’s easy to imagine you can just do it by yourself; but the other side of me is business-oriented. If we tried to build this all ourselves, the maintenance would be insane. That’s all we’d do—maintain the product. We’d never achieve our other goals and hit our growth metrics.”

Finch ultimately came out on top, in large part because its Unified Employment API standardizes data across all payroll providers, so Saveday’s operational and technical teams don’t have to. 

Saveday uses Finch to natively integrate with 40 different payroll providers. Processing a single payroll for a sponsor—a process that used to take 2+ hours—is now instant for Saveday and the sponsor.

“There have been a lot of benefits to Saveday. We’ve saved a ton of money, made our model profitable, and reduced compliance issues. Everything has gotten better for our team,” Albert said. 

“We’ve saved a ton of money, made our model profitable, and reduced compliance issues. Everything has gotten better for our team."

401(k) in 15 Minutes or Less

Saveday is focused on making it as easy as possible for SMB employers to offer a retirement plan, partially by stripping out the “million and one bells and whistles” that the majority of employers don’t need or want.

By coupling those simplified investment portfolios with Finch’s payroll integrations, Saveday was able to reduce its standard onboarding time from 5 hours to just 15 minutes.

Aaron Frankel, Saveday’s VP of Marketing and Sales, recalled speaking to the owner of a 5-person company that turned to Saveday after another 401(k) provider had them sit through 5 one-hour meetings just to choose all the specifics of their plan. 

“They told us, ‘It was maddening. I don’t have time for all of that,’” Aaron said. “With the Finch integration, once you hit that button to start onboarding, it’s 15 minutes or less, and you don’t even have to have a conversation with anyone at Saveday about it.”

Once the initial onboarding is complete, Saveday is able to pull employee data and write changes back to the payroll automatically, meaning the sponsor doesn’t need to have any involvement with the day-to-day management of their plan. 

“The plan administrator doesn't have to do anything, because the payrolls are synced, the censuses are synced, everything is done,” Albert said. “Most people are just like, ‘That can't be it.’ And we can tell them no, really, that’s it. You don't have to think about us ever again.”

More Transparency Means Better Compliance

Saveday’s bidirectional access to its sponsor's payroll systems does more than just bring critical employee data into its own system; it also allows the team to make changes back to the employer’s payroll. 

Before Finch, when a participant made a change to their contribution amount, Saveday’s team sent a notice to the sponsor, who then had to manually update the payroll system. This created a problem on two fronts: it put more work on the sponsor’s plate, and it left Saveday completely in the dark as to whether the change had actually been made. 

“There was always a kind of disconnect between the participant, the sponsor, and us. It was hard for us to validate whether a change had been made or not, or if they put in the right number, because we had no access,” Albert explained. “When we integrated, we were able to go back and validate: are the deduction percentages correct? If not, we need to update them with what the participant thinks they are.”

These 360° integrations have made it far easier for Saveday to stay compliant under SECURE 2.0, because they can automatically enroll participants and auto-escalate those participants’ contributions, all without ever having to go through the sponsor.

“Pre-integrations, that additional manual workload on the back end translated to a higher expense for the customers,” Aaron added. “Every time we can gain efficiency, that allows us to be much more competitive and accessible for our clients.”

“Every time we can gain efficiency, that allows us to be much more competitive and accessible for our clients.”

Innovating at Lightning Speed

Saveday already has impressive market coverage with the 40 payroll integrations the company uses today, but Albert and Aaron have plans to add more—much more.

“With Finch, we were able to get 40 integrations up and running in 3 months. We might have had a single payroll integration in 3 months if we’d written it ourselves,” Albert said. 

Whenever the team encounters a new payroll provider through a prospective customer, their first step is to see if Finch already has an integration with that provider. And if the integration doesn’t already exist, Saveday asks if they can make an introduction. 

The way Aaron sees it, Saveday has an opportunity to make retirement benefits more accessible to the 57 million Americans that don’t have a plan for the future. Partnering with a unified API like Finch makes it possible to expand Saveday’s offering at scale and at an affordable price. 

“It's been great for our business,” Albert added. “Finch has helped us deliver on the promise of a high-quality 401(k) at a price that everyone can afford and be happy with.”

Human Interest is a full-service 401(k) provider on a mission to make it easier for businesses of all sizes to offer retirement plans to their employees. An early adopter of 401(k) payroll integrations, Human Interest needed a reliable way to expand their home-grown 360° integrations to more providers—especially those that were hard to build directly.

Integrations are “number one”

Human Interest was ahead of the API integration curve. The 401(k) recordkeeper’s leadership recognized early on that the benefits that seamless, 360° data flow payroll integrations could offer were critical to their success, both to offer a best-in-class user experience and to support the wide range of plan designs sponsors need.

“Integrations are often the number one thing when differentiating yourself,” said Drew Obston, Manager of Product Operations. “We’re always looking for an opportunity to improve our value offering. With integrations, we’re able to go above and beyond and say, ‘You don’t have to upload payroll data. You don’t have to be provisioning someone on our team to log in to your payroll.’” For small and midsize businesses, where HR admins wear a lot of hats, that kind of user experience is paramount.

Human Interest boasts more than 500 payroll integrations, many of which were built in-house. While there's inherent value in all types of integrations, the company's Product Operations team considers fully automated payroll integrations—those that require zero day-to-day manual work—their north star metric. Eliminating the need to download files, check date ranges, validate data, and more has a big impact on efficiency. Drew shared that fully automated integrations allow Human Interest to process payroll up to 4x faster and make it so the team is 3x more likely to hit their Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ensuring customers get the experience they expect.

“If we were 100% relying on manual work by our Operations team to process payroll data, we would not have a sustainable business,” Drew said. “We’re at nearly 100% of our SLA to invest participants’ contributions within five business days. Without automation, we’d be at about 30% because the Operations team would just be underwater.”

“If we were 100% relying on manual work by our Operations team to process payroll data, we would not have a sustainable business."

“Worst-case scenario”

Human Interest has built an impressive arsenal of integrations on their own, but found they weren’t able to build bi-directional connections to every payroll provider their customers use.

Before partnering with Finch, Human Interest was using another third-party vendor to access sponsor data from two commonly used payroll providers that proved challenging to integrate with directly. However, the team ran into issues with the outsourced connections, which forced them to route most of the work through the Operations team. 

“It’s the worst-case scenario,” Drew said, due to security concerns and inefficiency. “It’s not a tenable solution; it doesn’t scale. We don’t want to keep hiring people to keep up with revenue growth. We would rather take our resources and dedicate them to good customer management, troubleshooting, and exploring better opportunities.”

Human Interest needed a reliable solution that would take the menial day-to-day work off their plate without passing the buck to their customers.

Unlocking access to closed systems

In early 2022, Human Interest partnered with Finch to get better access to the data their Operations team had been manually collecting and validating. Since then, they’ve launched a second integration with Finch for a separate payroll provider, and have begun to explore write-back functionality that will allow them to achieve full automation for both integrations. 

“The ease and support Finch has provided is what laid the foundation for us to consider Finch for additional payroll connections,” Drew said. “Going deeper is our biggest priority. We don’t want to just roll an integration out to say we have an integration. We want it to actually provide true value, both to our internal teams and more importantly, to the end user.”

By going through Finch, Human Interest wasn’t just able to build previously inaccessible integrations—Drew also estimates that the time to build was cut by 66%, primarily because the discovery process was already complete. When a single integration normally occupies 25% of the internal development team, that time savings is significant. 

“So much of what you’re doing when building a new integration is just trying to find all the weird things hiding around corners that you don’t know about. Finch is eliminating that work and giving us a level of confidence that we’re going to get an integration that works,” Drew said. “With that time, there’s a whole lot of other things we’re able to do. We’re able to make the product better.”

Streamlined onboarding

Automation saves the Operations team time and resources, but it also goes a long way in providing a better user experience for sponsors—especially when it comes to onboarding. 

Human Interest’s mission is to make it easier for all employees to save for retirement. Traditionally, SMBs have seldom offered retirement plans because they’ve been expensive, complicated, and required lots of administrative work. To combat this, Human Interest strives to make onboarding and plan administration as easy as possible. 

Enabling more self-service onboarding is a big goal for Drew’s team and a major part of their plan to establish fully automated integrations through Finch. “Sponsors shouldn’t have to get on more than five phone calls with their 401(k) recordkeeper and payroll provider just to set up a plan,” Drew said.

With Finch Connect, Human Interest’s customers are able to grant access to their payroll system in minutes. Drew anticipates that in the coming months, Human Interest will leverage Finch to augment their in-house integrations to enable that same kind of seamless onboarding to more payroll providers. 

The way Drew sees it, Finch’s Unified Employment API is another tool in Human Interest’s arsenal. There hasn’t been a drive to replace Finch’s connections with direct, in-house integrations because Finch provides all the functionality they need.

“We’ve built hundreds of integrations ourselves and we’re comfortable doing it when needed; but when we’re deciding where to dedicate developer resources, we ask ourselves how our current solution is working. If we can use a third party that will take work off our plate and still deliver the same end-user experience, why wouldn’t we?” 

“We’ve built hundreds of integrations ourselves...[but] if we can use a third party that will take work off our plate and still deliver the same end-user experience, why wouldn’t we?” 

Up next: Scale, scale, scale

The retirement industry is poised to see massive growth in plans offered by SMBs, largely driven by SECURE Act 2.0 and new state mandates that require employers to offer a retirement plan. For Human Interest, that’s a great opportunity that makes payroll integrations—and their ability to scale—more important than ever. 

Drew noted that one of Finch’s most valuable traits is the scalability of its integrations. “We don’t have to revisit a Finch integration when it grows. We feel very confident in what’s already being provided to us.”

With nearly 6,000 payroll providers serving the SMB market, Drew sees plenty of opportunity to continue growing the number of providers Human Interest can support with Finch.

“With Finch, part of the win is that we feel like we’re actually along for the ride,” Drew said. “There’s an element of collaboration that I’ve loved—so I see that continuing.”

Company

Rillet is modern accounting software made specifically for SaaS companies. Founded in 2021 by Nicolas Kopp, Rillet is on a mission to automate the tedious work that falls on accountants, empowering them to quickly get meaningful insight into the state of their company’s finances. 

Challenge

Payroll is a vital source of truth for accounting. But for accounting platforms like Rillet, collecting this data is no simple task. 

In the early days, the Rillet team relied on accountants to manually download files from their customers’ payroll systems and manually map, transform, and sanitize the data before uploading it to Rillet. If an accountant served multiple clients, the process had to be repeated. And if there was an error, they would be forced to manually revert the changes and run the process again. This tedious, repetitive, and error-prone process had to be completed each month. 

As Ernesto Medina Delgado, a software engineer at Rillet, points out — this initial experience was not tightly aligned with Rillet’s value proposition. 

“Our intention was to make the accountant’s life easier, not more complicated,” said Ernesto. “The initial solution was putting the burden on their shoulders, and we wanted to take that friction away.” 

The team quickly agreed that in order to deliver on Rillet’s vision, they would need to build integrations with payroll systems. The problem was that doing so would require a lot of engineering resources, both upfront and on an ongoing basis. 

“Building integrations requires a lot of effort from developers, not only to get them set up correctly but also to maintain the integration,” said Ernesto. “These are live systems that evolve over time. It’s not a set-it-and-forget-it type of situation.” 

“Building integrations requires a lot of effort from developers, not only to get them set up correctly but also to maintain the integration. "

Making matters worse, the sheer number of payroll systems on the market—5,700 and counting —meant they’d have to build many integrations if they wanted to serve both current and future customers. 

Solution

After some research, Nicolas asked Ernesto to evaluate Finch, the unified API for the employment ecosystem.

Ernesto soon discovered that, by building a single integration with Finch, Rillet could unlock the data they needed from over 40 payroll systems.

“Finch very quickly jumped to the front of the line,” said Ernesto. “Both the breadth of payroll systems they supported and the data standardization removed a huge burden from our developers’ shoulders. It was clear Finch would save us considerable time and money.”

Finch wasn’t the only provider the Rillet team considered, but it was the one with the best developer experience, according to Ernesto. 

For one, the developer documentation was clear and easy to understand, even for non-technical team members. 

“Code should read like a newspaper, with the most important information at the top and less important information at the bottom. Finch’s docs followed this best practice,” said Ernesto. “More importantly, the accounting team was able to validate that they would get the data they needed without the engineering team’s assistance.” 

Ernesto also received a technical walkthrough from one of Finch’s sales engineers, who helped him understand the options at his disposal for how to build the integration with Finch. 

“My experience with the Finch team not only left a positive impression, but also made me confident in my ability to integrate with Finch,” said Ernesto. “It made the decision to move forward with Finch easy.” 

When it came time to implement, the process was straightforward. His team built a functional proof of concept within a matter of hours, which they later leveraged to build the final solution. They then spent about one-third of their week mapping the data before they were ready to push to production. 

“After a single week, we were able to add all the payroll systems Finch supports to our list of integrations,” said Ernesto. “Compared to integrating with payroll systems one by one, it was really low-effort.”

“After a single week, we were able to add all the payroll systems Finch supports to our list of integrations. Compared to integrating with payroll systems one by one, it was really low-effort.”  

Results

Ernesto estimates that the process of integrating with Finch was 7X faster than it would have been to build a 1:1 integration with a single payroll system. More importantly, Rillet unlocked 40 payroll systems for the price of one. 

“I can’t imagine having to do the massive amount of work it would have taken to integrate with each individual payroll system,” said Ernesto. “We saved so, so many developer hours.” 

“I can’t imagine having to do the massive amount of work it would have taken to integrate with each individual payroll system. We saved so, so many developer hours.” 

Rillet’s customers also reaped the benefits of their decision. 

“The value our customers received during that timeframe was way higher than it would have been if we had to build the integrations ourselves,” said Ernesto. “Without the burden of building integrations, we were able to significantly improve our product during that period.” 

In addition to automating key accounting processes by pulling in and standardizing the customer’s payroll data, the Rillet team has embedded built-in reporting around key SaaS metrics into the product. That makes it possible for customers to get meaningful insight into the state of their finances within minutes of signing up, saving them the time it would typically take to build all those reports from scratch. Moreover, these reports allow accountants to see where the data comes from and how the numbers are calculated—helping eliminate possible errors. 

“Most accounting software was designed before the advent of the software-as-a-service industry,” said Ernesto. “We’re reimagining accounting software for the current era.” 

Throughout Rillet’s journey with Finch, they’ve been nothing but satisfied. 

“We’ve had very few issues throughout our journey with Finch, and the support team has been very responsive. They answer our questions and resolve any issues fast, while maintaining a high bar for quality,” said Ernesto. “We’re really happy to be working with Finch.”

TempoPay is a financial benefits platform that enables employers to remove the financial barriers that prevent their employees from accessing healthcare. The company’s mission is to empower people to access healthcare when they need it, without worrying about affordability concerns. Founded in 2021 by Tim Danison, Erika Davison-Aviles, and Joshua Goldstein, the company was conceptualized, built, and launched from within Redesign Health. 

The Challenge

“Financial barriers shouldn’t prevent people from staying healthy,” says Hattie Ninteau, TempoPay’s Marketing Manager. “But they do today.” 

Hattie knows what she’s talking about: According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, more than half of U.S. adults said they delayed getting medical attention in the past year due to an affordability concern. Even those who are insured often cannot afford care due to high deductibles, especially when faced with rising inflation. 

For employers, that means more sick days are used, along with a significant loss of productivity.

“Whether or not an employee seeks healthcare impacts their employer,” says Hattie. “It influences both if and how they show up to work.”

TempoPay’s founding team envisioned a solution that would help employees pay for out-of-pocket healthcare expenses—the ones traditional health benefits too often fail to cover. Employees would download a mobile app, register in under two minutes, and instantly get access to a TempoPay card. They could leverage the funds right away to pay for healthcare—unexpected or planned. TempoPay would finance the cost, secured by the individual’s employment. 

It quickly became clear that TempoPay would need a way to write after-tax deductions back to each individual's payroll. Traditionally this burden would fall on the HR administrator, but TempoPay knew that wasn’t an option.

“SFTP and flat file uploads were out of the question,” said Erika Davison-Aviles, Co-Founder & Head of Product, TempoPay. “Manual file uploads are not only time-consuming, they’re wrought with errors. They simply didn’t align with our vision.”

Reducing the burden on employers would be key to getting employees fast access to the care they so desperately needed. 

The Solution

TempoPay’s founding team began to search for a solution that would empower them to build an MVP. They needed to find an API product that could both read vital employment data and write deductions back to each employer’s payroll system. 

This was the only path forward. After all, they wanted to provide a frictionless user experience for everyone. 

“Employers don’t want to jump through hoops to figure out how to deliver benefits to their employees,” said Hattie. “They want simple, set-it-and-forget-it solutions.” 

Through thoughtful research and market analysis, the TempoPay team identified Finch, the unified API for the employment ecosystem, as a potential partner. 

The TempoPay team did their due diligence: They assessed several unified APIs and iPaaS providers. But only Finch offered the ability to both read the employee’s payroll frequency and write deductions back to their payroll system.

“Frankly, there were no other solutions that could support our vision and facilitate writing payroll deductions automatically,” said Erika. “Finch had the technology and functionality that best met our product needs.” 

The Benefits of Using Finch

After becoming a Finch customer, the TempoPay team was thrilled.

“Implementation was straightforward, and the impact was immediate,” said Erika. “Finch's assisted integrations are leagues ahead of the typical batch file process. Instead of waiting a month for new deductions to process, we can make updates every week. That’s lightning speed in our niche.”

In other words, TempoPay can now write payroll deductions over 4X faster. 

The end-user experience exceeded Hattie’s expectations. 

“Employers literally just press a button. It typically takes 30 seconds to onboard through Finch Connect," said Hattie.

As a result, they were able to achieve industry-leading adoption rates.

For Erika, the experience with Finch’s developer success team also stands out. 

“Every time I share product requirements and emphasize the need to move quickly toward a solution, the Finch team delivers. It’s the quintessential case study for agile.”

Together, the TempoPay and Finch teams are testing the limits of how deductions are managed.

“Every time an employee’s card is swiped, a new payment plan is triggered and their deductions change as a result,” said Erika. “For us, that means that every employer, every employee, and every pay period is unique.”

While the initial MVP build took some time, they’ve since enjoyed “months of smooth sailing” while providing healthcare benefit solutions the industry never before thought possible.

Looking forward, the TempoPay team plans to continue innovating. They recently expanded into pet care and veterinary expenses, and are offering more comprehensive employee benefits and financial wellness solutions that give employees access to critical funds when they need it most. 

“We’re growing quickly and Finch has been a fantastic partner throughout our journey, helping us realize our vision of providing financial benefits that meet the needs of the modern-day employee.”

Their customers are eager for the TempoPay team to solve new and related problems. With Finch as a partner, they’re able to fulfill most requests. 

“I’m confident in our growing platform because I know we have Finch as our partner,” said Erika. 

At Finch, we’re excited to partner with game-changing applications like TempoPay. If you’re interested in exploring data integrations, reach out to our sales team or start building with our unified API.

More about TempoPay

TempoPay is available 24/7/365 and employers can bring TempoPay to their company anytime. There’s no need for employees to wait until an enrollment or onboarding period starts. There is no need for credit checks. Employees pay zero fees and no interest. They can choose to repay via payroll deductions or their personal bank account—providing them with a significant degree of flexibility. 

The social impact is profound. Employees can access care when needed, including medications or treatments that their health insurance plan doesn't cover. That’s helpful, for example, when you need to schedule a costly surgery. Or when your doctor prescribes a new medication that costs several hundred dollars to fill.

TempoPay works with each employer to understand their unique employee population. They then make a recommendation regarding an appropriate and responsible spending limit, which usually ranges from $1,500 to $5,000. True to their commitment to flexibility, they can support different benefit configurations such as spending categories and funding options. This enables the team to work creatively with employers seeking a modern financial wellness solution for healthcare expenses and more. 

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Thatch is a health benefits platform designed for the modern era. The company’s mission is to help startups provide their teams with personalized healthcare in under five minutes. Founded in 2021 by Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson, the company has raised funding from top investors like a16z, General Catalyst, and Google Ventures. 

The Challenge—Building Payroll Integrations, Fast

“The way health benefits work today is very paternalistic,” said Chris Ellis, Co-Founder and CEO of Thatch. “Employers are forced to choose one pair of shoes and hope it fits every member of the team.”

Imagine that, after researching your options and polling your team, you decide to buy Nike runners in a size 10 in bulk. Soon after, someone comes to you and says they need a size 7. Another team member says they’d prefer Reeboks. Yet another employee wants hiking boots. 

Picking a one-size-fits-all health benefits plan can be similarly frustrating for HR professionals and the employees they serve. To save money, employers must purchase group health insurance plans with standardized benefits, which often leaves employees with varying needs unsatisfied. 

Group plans also don’t make it easy for employers. The onboarding and yearly enrollment processes often require them to manually move data between their HRIS, payroll, and benefits administration systems. When a new employee is hired, an existing employee departs, or another qualifying life event occurs, the employer must also manually make changes to the plan.

From the start, Chris and his team were obsessed with delivering an unparalleled customer experience. To build a health benefits platform that provided employees the control and flexibility they deserved, his team would need to leverage technology to deal with any corresponding complexity. “Choosing and managing health benefits is often a thankless job,” said Chris. “We are determined to remove the administrative burden.” In other words, they refused to burden the HR administrator with the tedious task of manually managing employee deductions. After all, these deductions were bound to vary from employee to employee and pay period to pay period.

“Choosing and managing health benefits is often a thankless job. We are determined to remove the administrative burden.”

For example, say all employees have a $500 monthly budget for healthcare. One employee chooses a $350 health insurance plan, leaving them with $150 each month to spend on out-of-pocket medical expenses. In January, they spend $167.25 leading to a $17.25 deduction. But, in February, the employee has no medical expenses, and so doesn’t pay any deduction. 

Without automated deductions management, this data would need to be updated manually—for every employee, every pay period.

Making matters more complicated, every employee is different. Whereas one employee might choose a $350 health insurance plan, another might choose a $700 plan. That individual’s out-of-pocket expenses would be added on top of their monthly $200 deduction. 

“Small businesses want to offer great benefits, but don’t have the bandwidth to deal with complexity,” said Chris. “They just want to know that your solution works and it can deliver the end result they’re looking for.” 

To deliver on this vision, the Thatch team realized they would need to build integrations to each customer’s source of truth for deductions—their payroll system. Chris knew that wouldn’t be an easy feat. 

“With the unbundling of payroll from benefits, we needed to achieve the same level of connectivity, accuracy, fidelity, and timeliness as our customers had become accustomed to,” Chris explained. “And we had to do that without ever being inside the payroll system—and without burdening our customers or their employees.” 

Thatch’s founding team was left with two options: 

1. Invest in building a 1:1 integration with each payroll provider

By Chris’s estimation, in-house development would have meant hiring four additional employees across product, engineering, and business development at a cost of approximately $800,000 per year.

It would have taken at least a year to build the minimum number of integrations they would need to launch. Plus, they would probably have had to go to market with fewer integrations than desired. (After all, there are more than 5,700 payroll providers on the U.S. market, and the top 10 only account for 55% of employers.) In other words, if they chose this route, their near-term total addressable market would be limited.

Complicating matters was the fact that many payroll providers exclusively partner with businesses that already have shared customers. That created a chicken-or-egg problem for Thatch, which had yet to launch let alone acquire a sufficient number of customers to qualify.

2. Find a better way to achieve their goals

From Chris’s perspective, the traditional path presented obstacles that were insurmountable for an early-stage startup. So, his team kicked off a search for a more realistic solution that provided plug-and-play employment integrations. 

The Solution—Finch's Unified Employment API

Beyond needing a faster and more cost-effective way to integrate with the industry’s most popular payroll providers, Thatch wanted a solution that could help their team automate the tedious process of writing deductions back to each employer’s payroll system. 

They soon heard from another founder that they could leverage Finch’s unified employment API to unlock access to over 200 HRIS and payroll systems. 

Chris and his team did their due diligence: They evaluated several competitors, but quickly realized Finch was the only solution that could satisfy their need to both read employee data and write deductions back to each employer’s payroll system. Finch also allowed them to reconcile their ledger, making sure all the dollars and cents added up in a compliant way.

What stood out, though, was the exceptional user experience Finch facilitated. By embedding Finch Connect into their onboarding flow, employers could give Thatch permission to both read and write back to their payroll system in under 30 seconds. 

“Finch’s user interface and security standards met our high quality bar. We were confident that, by leveraging Finch, we’d be able to earn the trust of the employers we served.” 

When it came time to implement Finch, Chris found the setup process to be seamless. As his team navigated its complex use case, the Finch team not only offered unwavering support but also contributed their unique expertise. 

As a result, the Thatch team was also able to provide value-add services its customers never expected. For example, by reading whether an individual was still active within the organization, Thatch was able to notify customers when it came time to offboard employees from its benefits program. 

“Finch is truly a strategic partner,” said Chris. “Together, we’re able to push the envelope on what’s possible. In fact, in the short time we’ve been working together, most or all of our product requests have been implemented.” 

Results—$800K in Savings, 10X More Revenue

By leveraging Finch’s unified API, Chris estimates that his team saved $800,000 in payroll costs, got to market 10 months sooner, and captured 10X more revenue. 

“The benefits of Finch were immediately obvious. We can easily spin up new payroll integrations and unlock new revenue opportunities without adding engineering headcount or building out a business development team.” 

With the time and money the Thatch team saved, they were able to deliver on their commitment to their customers—building a product with a best-in-class user experience. 

“We made a great decision by partnering with Finch,” said Chris. “I can’t imagine building our product any other way.” 

Today, Thatch empowers small businesses to offer their employees personalized healthcare in just five minutes. 

The process is simple for employers: They define a tax-free healthcare budget. Their employees choose a plan that suits their needs and then use any leftover money to pay for out-of-pocket expenses. Individuals can use their Thatch card to purchase anything from therapy sessions to fertility treatments to braces for their children. 

By pooling the resources of many businesses together under the Thatch umbrella, they’re able to offer employers better health insurance plans at lower rates—benefits that are increasingly difficult for startups to access. In other words, Thatch helps small businesses offer big-company benefits.

When asked if he has any advice for the product and engineering leaders who are considering using Finch, Chris had this to say:

“Payroll integration shouldn’t be your core competency. Like Stripe for payments and Plaid for bank accounts, Finch is the best solution in its category. It would take you longer and cost you more to reinvent the wheel."

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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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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!